Hello there. I am very uninformed when it comes to Microsoft Windows programming. It's not that hard to make portable code, so compiling my code is not the hard part; the hard part is figuring out exactly what developers expect from a binary version of a library.
On Linux (my main development platform), I can simply build a static library and shared library and package it along with the headers and that's all I need.
But on Windows I am not sure exactly what I would need to produce for a binary version of a library meant to be picked up and used by other developers. I have seen Windows libraries distributed with .dll files in a 'bin' directory, or sometimes in a 'lib' directory. Sometimes I see files that end in .def as well.
Can someone who is a Windows programmer tell me exactly what they would expect to find in a .zip file that contained a compiled C++ library? Just for reference, I expect at a minimum to provide: libmame.a, libmame.dll, libmame.h ...
I have actually read about Windows .dlls and such so I know something of how shared libraries work on Windows but I can't tell exactly what the conventions are for distributing them.
Will a .dll compiled by MingW be sufficient for linking by any Windows compiler? Are there any special caveats I need to pay attention to? The GNU toolchain doesn't seem to require all of the 'dllexport/dllimport' baloney that I often see in Windows code - is that stuff needed for other Windows compilers, or is it just optional?
I hope to be releasing some code and a library soon and the Linux version has been ready since forever, but I just finished putting the finishing Windows porting touches on it and now I have no idea how to actually make a distributable version for Windows, so any hints at all will be most helpful.
Thanks!
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