Also please ignore any grammatical errors its been a long day :D CC+ Ray because I remembered he knows the ld maintainer for windows CC+ JB so that he knows this is now been proposed to be merged CC+ Martin because he was interested in developing a similar tool
On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 12:50 AM, Martell Malone <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Kai and I discussed this previously but I would like to present to > everyone a tool to generate import libs based on layout and code structure > of gendef. > > I would like propose > https://github.com/martell/genlib > to be merged as part of the mingw-w64 project. > > There are a couple of advantages over using this to dlltool. > > 1. This tool supports the following targets armv7 aarch64 i686 and x86_64. > where as dlltool currently supports just i686 and x86_64 > (and a really old arm target thats not NT) > > 2. The target is specified at runtime so one build will do for all > targets. > (this will be especially useful for cross compiling) > > 3. This tool unlike dlltool complies to the PE/COFF spec 7. > Import Library Format. so that we can interop with other linkers > besides ld. > > The 2 most common use cases would be > > 1. Using llvm's linker lld which is now feature complete for COFF on arm > x86 and x64. > 2. Generate an import lib for msvc to use which dlltool could not do. > > I'm sure some have noticed but I have added support for building the > mingw-w64 crt with clang over the last few months. > With this mingw-w64 becomes linker independant and can be compiled with > either gcc or clang and is not bound to ld anymore. > > I would like to propose we initially have a flag to enable using this when > building the crt. Some of the autotools experts here may know some more on > that. This is because currently ld does not support PE/COFF spec 7 and does > not understand the resulting library. > > Ideally it would be great if the maintainers of ld could comply with > PE/COFF spec 7. Import Library Format. > Maybe someone could cc the windows ld maintainer on this? > > The code much like the other mingw-w64-tools like gendef is not the > cleanest but I am open to changes and review of course. I have left notes > in the source for things that should be added and how we might refactor it. > Feel free to hammer me on this btw. :) > > As for the reason this was created. > Quite simply it was for the vlc media player to migrate to clang from msvc > or gcc adding support for the armv7 target. So the videolan were the > sponsors of this work > > Hoping to hear from everyone > Martell >
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