• reimi gibbons (6/6) Jan 21 2009 Hi all,
• Daniel Keep (14/24) Jan 21 2009 You need two things to link to a DLL:
• Sergey Gromov (14/21) Jan 25 2009 The easiest way is to link with an import library. It's exactly like

reimi gibbons <rei2x hotmail.com> writes:

Hi all,

I'm currently developing a software with D and Tango. I don't have much
knowledge on DLL, but i do know when linking to static lib you need a .h header
file, but do i need .h for linking with DLL as well?

also can anybody please provide a quick and small example to link with DLL.

*im trying to link my software with ICU lib, since mango seems outdated.

Thanks,
Reimi.

Daniel Keep <daniel.keep.lists gmail.com> writes:

reimi gibbons wrote:
 Hi all,
 
 I'm currently developing a software with D and Tango. I don't have much
knowledge on DLL, but i do know when linking to static lib you need a .h header
file, but do i need .h for linking with DLL as well?
 
 also can anybody please provide a quick and small example to link with DLL.
 
 *im trying to link my software with ICU lib, since mango seems outdated.
 
 Thanks,
 Reimi.

You need two things to link to a DLL:

1. You need the interface of the DLL.  In C/C++, this is provided by .h
files; in D, this is simply provided by a D module.

2. Loader code.

You can either roll your own, or generate the above two.  You can use
htod (it's somewhere on the official D pages) which tries to convert a C
header file into a D import module.

As for the loader code, you can either write a dynamic loader, or just
use implib on the DLL to generate one (I think; it's been a while since
I've had to roll one.)

If I can remember more specific details, I'll post again, but that's the
basic gist of it.

  -- Daniel

Sergey Gromov <snake.scaly gmail.com> writes:

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:19:48 -0500, reimi gibbons wrote:

 I'm currently developing a software with D and Tango. I don't have
 much knowledge on DLL, but i do know when linking to static lib you
 need a .h header file, but do i need .h for linking with DLL as well?
 
 
 also can anybody please provide a quick and small example to link
 with DLL. 

The easiest way is to link with an import library.  It's exactly like
linking with a static library.  Actually you *are* linking with a static
library, but that's a special kind of static library which forwards your
calls to a DLL.  This way runtime automatically loads the DLL before
your program starts and unloads it after main() terminates, so you don't
need to bother yourself with details.

As Daniel pointed out, you can try to convert an existing .h file into a
.d file using htod:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/htod.html

The most reliable way to get an import library for your DLL is to get a
.lib file in COFF format provided with the DLL and convert it into OMF
format using coffimplib:

ftp://ftp.digitalmars.com/coffimplib.zip