I am trying to compile my program, which uses boost library, with MSVC 2013 and I get link error:
Cannot open input file boost_iostreams-vc120-1.57.lib
I already built boost successfully a few times with many combinations of options (for example "bjam toolset=msvc --build-type=complete"), but I don't have boost_iostreams-vc120-1.57.lib in my stage directory. I have there libraries with names libboost_iostreams.lib, libboost_iostreams-vc-120-mt-1_57.lib and others. Also I don't want to change any settings in MSVC, because my project was generated by CMake.
So the question is: How do I build library boost_iostreams-vc120-1.57.lib with Windows?
Thanks for answers and sorry for my english
-mt suffix means build with multithreading support that is always on for MSVC. Single threaded CRT was dropped in VS 2008 or even 2005, so both your code and boost will be multithreading aware anyway. If you don't want to change your build config you can simply remove "-mt" suffix from libraries names. But since boost has MSVC autolink support (#pragma comment (lib, "...") in header files) it may be better to make an exception for MSVC and not to link to boost libraries manually at all.
Related
I'm trying to link to the OpenAL soft library as compiled with the Media Autobuild Suite, and I'm getting the following error from Visual Studio:
libopenal.a(source.cpp.o) : fatal error LNK1143: invalid or corrupt file: no symbol for COMDAT section 0xA
My application is in C++ and compiled directly in Visual Studio 2019 (however, with the VS2017 toolset). OpenAL soft is written in C++ but exposes a C interface, and the MAB Suite compiles using MinGW/gcc and generates a libopenal.a static library file.
I've read from multiple other questions such as From MinGW static library (.a) to Visual Studio static library (.lib) and How to use libraries compiled with MingW in MSVC? that object files compiled with different compilers are generally not compatible for C++ due to name mangling, but often are compatible with C linkage. Because C does not use name mangling, and because the ABI is (usually) OS-dependent, libraries with a C interface compiled on the same platform are generally compatible.
Nevertheless, I've been running into linker errors, namely the LNK1143 above. I've confirmed that the included headers use extern "C" { to hint C linkage and that the target platform (x64) is the same for both builds. I also linked to libgcc.a as this answer recommends, and did not get any linker errors for it.
Does this mean the claim that C interfaces are generally compatible across compilers is not true? Or is this a special case in which it's not working? If the latter, what could be causing the linking to fail? Would I have better luck if I recompiled as shared libraries (dlls) instead of static libraries (even if I still use MinGW's .a files instead of .lib)?
I cannot change compilers from MSVC for my main app. I intend to use more libraries from the MAB Suite in the future, so I'd prefer to stay with MinGW for those dependencies if possible because I don't want to recompile all 70+ by hand.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Mixing compilers is tricky and prone to issues.
In some very simple cases it may work, but there are definitely a number of cases where you will run in to issues, for example:
if the different components use different runtime libraries
if memory management is being mixed (e.g. forget about freeing memory allocated with malloc() in MSVC using free() in MinGW)
when using exception handling in C++
My advice to do it all with the same compiler (and even the same version of this compiler).
Specifically in your case OpenAL can be built with MinGW-w64. So maybe you should look into that instead of downloading some prebuilt version from the web.
Or - somewhat easier - use MSYS2 and use its pacman package manager to get its own MinGW-w64 build of OpenAL.
I figured out what works for me, so I'll share.
I was not able to link a static library between compilers as I originally attempted. My understanding is that the extra info kept in the lib to allow link-time code generation is compiler-specific. Brecht Sanders's answer outlines a few possible reasons why the code wouldn't be compatible.
I was, however, able to link to a shared library, with a few extra steps.
Using the same suite (see the question), I compiled as shared and got libopenal.dll, libopenal.dll.a, and libopenal.def. In my case, the .def file was generated by the suite. Accoding to this answer, you can generate a .def file with gcc using:
gcc -shared -o your_dll.dll your_dll_src.c -Wl,--output-def,your_dll.def
Trying to link to libopenal.dll.a still gave me errors (I don't know exactly why, and I already discarded the logs.) What I did instead was generate a .lib file from the .def file. In Visual Studio's built-in terminal:
lib /machine:x64 /def:libopenal.def
This generated a libopenal.lib file in the working directory. Linking to this file worked perfectly, and I was able to successfully load the dll at runtime.
I've tested this same method with many other MinGW-compiled libraries from the suite, including libavformat, libavcodec, libavutil, libavdevice, swresample, and swscale, and thus far all of them have worked.
Kind of convoluted, but it seems to work well for me, so I hope this helps anyone else with the same problem.
Tools and versions:
Visual Sudio 2017, Google Protobufs 3.11.3, gRPC 1.27.1, vcpkg 2020.02.04, on Microsoft Windows
I used vcpkg to build the Windows native C++ versions of gRPC and protobuf (and other dependencies) for Windows (x86). Everything builds successfully.
When I build my application I include "libprotobuf.lib" as a linker input. However, it doesn't get linked. Instead, my program will only run if the "libprotobuf.dll" is present for the program to load. I don't know of another way to specify that the library should be statically linked.
During the build of my application, I see a lot of warnings like this:
include\google\protobuf\duration.pb.h(220): warning C4251: 'google::protobuf::Duration::_internal_metadata_': class 'google::protobuf::internal::InternalMetadataWithArena' needs to have dll-interface to be used by clients of class 'google::protobuf::Duration'
This page mentions the warnings and says that static linking is the default but it seems like vcpkg isn't building it that way or I need to reference the library a different way.
I've also seen this page that offers a solution. That helped a bit. It made Visual Studio recognize unresolved externals, so at least it was trying to statically link the .lib file(s). With that in place I've tried various combinations of .lib files for protobuf, grpc, and dependencies but I still can't get a successful build - and the compiler warnings are still generated.
I feel like I'm missing something (a pre-processor define maybe) during the vcpkg build that would build the headers or libraries differently. I've tried to change some of the build settings but they're always overwritten when vcpkg generates cmake files for the build.
Or I'm missing the right combination of library files to reference from my project.
Has anyone gotten this to work? If you have examples of building the libraries for static linking via vcpkg, or the correct way to link the libraries in VS2017 project, could you share your information?
Finally got a chance to come back to this. The problem came down to two things:
1. Realizing that you can specify a triplet (as noted in original question).
2. Finally realizing using the static libraries also meant I had to switch my application to static c runtime libraries instead of shared dlls.
I can't switch my application. I've done testing with this non-static mode operation though. I haven't seen any problems, but does anyone else use protobufs (and gRPC this way) - it doesn't appear to be recommended.
I'm using CLion as my IDE. I downloaded MinGW from here (comes with boost), extracted, installed and connected it to CLion successfully. Then I set my compiler flags in CMakeLists and when I compiled my program, I encounted hundreds of warnings coming from boost libraries (in this case - boost/lexical_cast.hpp).
I really want to use most, if not all, of these compiler flags, but I also don't want boost (which is for sure better written than any of my own programs) to generate that much noise.
Is there any way of disabling all warnings from particular header / library (maybe even namespace)?
You can add the include paths as SYSTEM instead of standard ones:
target_include_directories(target SYSTEM ${Boost_INCLUDE_DIR})
This only works for GCC and clang, as Visual Studio doesn't have a specific include flag for system paths.
I've downloaded Boost Binaries from here. My project depends on boost_system and boost_filesystem, and builds correctly if I add the proper dependencies to Linker Options when using Visual Studio for compilation, but I'm now trying to compile under Code::Blocks (MinGW compiler) and running into the following:
"directve `/FAILIFMISMATCH:"_MSC_VER=1800" /FAILIFMISMATCH:"_ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL=0" /FAILIFMISMATCH:"RuntimeLibrary=MD_DynamicRelease" /DEFAULTLIB:"msvcprt" /DEFAULTLIB:"uuid.lib" /DEFAULTLIB:"uuid.lib" "
Though that's a warning, it keeps me from finding the dependencies, because my project fails to build with undefined reference to 'boost::system::generic_category()' and plenty of other related undefined references.
Question: Should I compile Boost from source using MinGW, in order to solve my problem?
Of course, I'm using the proper libraries for my build configuration (Release, dynamic runtime library).
I'm making an answser based on the comments posted below my question, just to make things proper.
So, building boost from the source code using the same compiler (I used TDM-GCC with gcc 4.8.1) did solve the linking issues.
As noted by Rup, one "can't mix C++ compiled with GCC and Visual Studio: they have different C++ ABI implementations, and generate different 'manglings' of identifier names so that linker symbols won't match up."
Additional reference: Interoperability of Libraries Created by Different Compiler Brands
Greetings,
I am facing a complicated situation about using a static library under windows.
The static library is build by a specific version of mingw which is bundled with Eiffel studio. Since Eiffel studio uses mingw to create its output as a static lib, I have no control over this configuration.
If I try to use this static library with Eclipse CDT which is using a more recent version of mingw, then I can't compile my project. This is because I have to provide -l options to various libraries like winsock, and it appears due to difference between versions of compilers generating static library and my code, this does not work.
If I force Eclipse to use the same mingw directory that comes with Eiffel studio, the one that compiled the static lib, then I can compile my code (there are some other issues here though)
I do not want to constrain my c++ development just because a static library is build with a particular version of mingw.
So how can I use this static library from my own mingw version? This is windows xp btw..
Best Regards
Seref
Though I don't have a lot of information here is what I would do:
Try to compile with the newer version of mingw and see if you can make it work. Errors are very important in this case (you should check also the mingw manual/mailing lists/forums for finding about the compatibility between mingw versions
Separate the library from the program and wrap all its functionality - to avoid different incompatible compilation flags (you could create a different library - even a DLL and call your new functions (wrappers for some library functions)
Decide what part of the project is mandatory - the part with the library or the rest of the code
If the library is mandatory I would compile the code with that version of mingw
Else I would try to find an equivalent for that library or eliminate it
Others option may be available but this is what I would do (in this order)