[Haskell-cafe] Re: binding to C libraries on Windoww

[Stephen Tetley]

Hi Andrew

2009/12/6 Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>:

>
> On Windows, it is usual to distribute everything as compiled binaries.
> (Indeed, for most commercial software, the sources simply aren't available
> at all.) And users get a binary program and binary DLLs or whatever.
> Developers get a binary DLL and whatever header files or import libraries
> are necessary to use it.

Indeed, but the Haskell libraries you want to use are in source form,
no? Being a Haskell developer you're at least one step out of the
usual, and most of the libraries are coming from developers on Unix so
they can't be expected to package things for Windows.


 > If I'm understanding this correctly, John is saying that GCC requires a
> different form of import library before you can access a DLL. For
> binary-only DLLs, this presumably won't be available. Hence the (abnormal)
> requirement to build the whole library from source, rather than just drop in
> a DLL and be done with it.

John mentioned pexports in another message. I'd never come across it
before - it would seem to improve the situation significantly,
certainly for libraries that are more easily compilable with MSVCC
like PortAudio, Shiva OpenVG, or where you have a reasonable DLL
distributed like SDL.

Best wishes

Stephen