General linking question

Greetings C experts :)

I have a very simple question that I feel should be asked sooner rather than later. First off I will say I have MinGW installed, and am using Code::Blocks IDE on top of it, with a few plugins allowing for different project types like SDL and OpenGL, GLUT, Ogre3d, etc...

If you have a source file (say test.c), that has an #include at the top that includes the SDL header (say SDL.h), you can then reference externally defined functions. After compilation, is there any specific job the user has to do in order to bind the definitions on SDL.h to the library (say SDL.lib)? Both the header and the library are in the default \include and \lib directories, and it definitely finds the header file because it compiles successfully.

I ask this because when I create an SDL project with Code::Blocks, I haven't added any external references to a library, nor could I find anything in the settings of the IDE that references it by default (since it is an SDL project). It compiles and links correctly. But when I manually added PDCurses to the \header and \lib directories, and created a program with it, it could find the header with no problem, but only could link it if I explicitly added a reference to the PDCurses .lib file.

Basically what I don't understand is why the SDL app worked with seemingly no reference to the corresponding lib, but the PDCurses app did not work unless I explicitly referenced its lib file.

Thanks for the help in advance,
Brandon

Linking is not normally automatic. Your environment seems to link SDL automatically, because this is an "SDL project," but this is not the norm. Usually, you must link against a library explicitly. Including a header file won't cause the linker to do it automatically, since the linker has no clue what a header file is.

What happens if you create a non-SDL project? Can you compile SDL code? Probably not. Somewhere, somehow, the SDL is being explicitly linked to. Probably this is being done by your IDE. Just guessing.

SDL.lib? I thought only libSDL.a worked with MinGW . . . well, my version at least.

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Quote:

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Including a header file won't cause the linker to do it automatically, since the linker has no clue what a header file is.

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Actually I think there are compiler-specific pragmas for MSVC that will link a to library. Something like this:

Code:

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#pragma lib("SDL.lib")

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Okay, that is as I thought. I figured Code::Blocks was just doing something behind the scenes that I couldn't find. I will try the empty project idea to confirm.

And yes, the SDL.lib was just kind of made up. I didn't recall the exact name off the top of my head :)

Thanks for the (extremely) prompt reply. I am gonna have to come back here for any C/C++ questions I have :).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dwks

SDL.lib? I thought only libSDL.a worked with MinGW . . . well, my version at least.

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Microsoft style .lib files are identical to .a files, at least these days. So I bet it could link a library called XXX as either XXX.lib or libXXX.a.

Hmm. I'll have to try renaming some .libs. You may have saved me a lot of hassle. Thank you. :)