From: Shawn Hargreaves Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: MS VC++ libs with DJGPP Date: Sat, 2 Aug 1997 17:44:29 +0100 Organization: None Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <12344659319966 AT onaustralia DOT com DOT au> NNTP-Posting-Host: talula.demon.co.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Lines: 36 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk Tom Cook writes: >Is it possible to use Microsoft's C/C++ libraries (legal copies, of course) >with DJGPP? Could you just rename, say, 'graph.lib' to 'libgraph.a' and >then link it using ld.exe? Or are Microsoft's libs incompatible with ld? > >If this is ridiculous please say so, if not please help. Unfortunately, I have to say that it is fairly ridiculous :-) Partly, the library file formats are different. Both ultimately contain intel machine code, but the header information about which code belongs to what functions, what data goes in what sections, etc, is different. In theory you could from one object format to another, but I think it would be a painful process. More seriously, the code generated by a particular compiler usually makes a lot of assumptions about the environment in which it will be run. The conventions as to how function parameters and return values are passed, and which registers a routine is allowed to clobber, are liable to differ, and compilers also sometimes generate calls to helper functions (for copying or setting blocks of memory, manipulating data types not natively supported by the processor, etc) that won't be the same between the two systems. Not to mention the fact that djgpp programs run in protected mode, while these Microsoft libs probably contain real mode code, which is a very different and incompatible way of doing things... Your best bet is probably either to obtain the sources to these libraries and recompile them with djgpp (this is liable to require a lot of changes to make them work), or to find other djgpp libraries that perform the same functions. -- Shawn Hargreaves - shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/ Beauty is a French phonetic corruption of a short cloth neck ornament.