Re: [Mingw-users] Help exporting functions from an exe

[Tor Lillqvist <tml@xxxxxx>]

> That makes no sense.  An exe file does not export functions or variables..

Not very often, true, but an exe file can have an export table just
like DLLs typically have. I will show you. Create these three files:

main.c:
== cut here ==
#include <stdio.h>

__declspec(dllexport) void
foo(void)
{
  printf ("Goodbye world\n");
}

__declspec(dllimport) void bar(void);

int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
  bar ();
  return 0;
}
== cut here ==

dll.c:
== cut here ==
#include <stdio.h>

__declspec(dllimport) void foo(void);

__declspec(dllexport) void
bar(void)
{
  printf ("Hello world\n");
  foo ();
}
== cut here ==

And main.def:
== cut here ==
EXPORTS
foo
== cut here ==

Then run:

dlltool -D main.exe -d main.def -l libmain.dll.a
gcc -Wall -shared -o dll.dll -Wl,--out-implib,libdll.dll.a l.c -L. -lmain
gcc -Wall -o main.exe in.c -L. -ldll

And then verify with objdump -p that indeed main.exe exports foo and
imports bar from dll.dll, and dll.dll exports bar and imports foo from
main.exe.

Instead of a DLL explicitly "statically" importing a function (or
variable) from a named exe as in this example, what is much more
common is that some library dynamically looks up the name of a
function exported from the main exe, which typically happens in
environments where some degree of interpretation is going on.

--tml

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