Re: [AD] statically linking small addons

[Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10 Aug 2009, at 10:59 , Peter Wang wrote:
> Matthew suggested that small addons should be statically linked on
> Windows so as to avoid proliferation of DLLs. (I think that's not
> necessarily on Linux; don't know about Mac.)

I'm probably the wrong person to give an opinion on this, since I use  
my Mac as a generic UNIX system. To me, the situation would be the  
same as on Linux, where I would agree it's not much of an issue.
I guess it would depend on what the "preferred" way to link to Allegro  
on OS X would be. Probably this would involve frameworks or something  
like that, where I'm not sure how this would be handled.

On the other hand, I seem te recall someone (Peter Hull?) stating that  
the recommended way to link on OS X would be static linking anyway (so  
people don't need to install the Allegro framework to run programs  
using Allegro), or to put the Allegro dylibs inside the application  
bundle, in which case this is a non-issue.

> Indeed it's not very hard to accomodate that in CMake.  However, our
> static libraries have the "-static" suffix so users on Windows will  
> need
> to write -lallegro-4.9 but -lallegro_color-static-4.9 (or whatever).
> Is that okay?

I guess.
The way I would do this would be to allow both static and dynamic  
linking for small addons, but to change the default to "static". If  
someone really wants a DLL for a small addon, they can change it to  
dynamic. I'm not sure how easy *that* is though.

> Secondly, ALLEGRO_STATICLINK.  I'm fuzzy on what it does exactly so
> would someone explain if there will be any trouble with that?

Do you mean whether there could be issues with addons expecting a  
statically linked version of Allegro failing to work correctly with a  
dynamically linked one?

Evert