Re: [Mingw-users] DLL builds attempt to resolve all lib references?

Matt England wrote:
> Why do shared/dynamic library (DLL) builds in mingw/msys with g++ 
> attempt to resolve all references, even for other libraries?
> 
> Linux systems, on the other hand, don't try to resolve all references 
> when building shared-object (.so) files (which I understand have some 
> sort of resemblance to Windows DLLs), but rather the references are 
> resolved at the time the application that uses said libraries is built.
> 
> Eg, when trying to build (within mingw) a library that uses the bzip2 
> module, I get reference errors like this:
> 
> g++ -shared [...a slew of .o files...] libutil.dll
> BZipBufferCompressor.o:BZipBufferCompressor.cpp:(.text+0xb39): undefined 
> reference to `BZ2_bzCompressEnd@4'
> [...]
> 
> How can I avoid this the library-build-time reference errors and instead 
> push the link-time-reference resolution to the time of an application 
> build?  This would also dramatically reduce the size of the .dlls when 
> reference static libraries (presumably).
> 
> Maybe Windows defines DLLs to be freestanding apps, and hence is 
> distinctly different then Linux .so files?  If so, where can I read more 
> about this?
The only way to do what you want would be to make the libraries in question 
  dll files themselves.