Fails to build shared library on WIndows/MSVC

[GyrosGeier]

While building with MSVC (9.0) and -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=TRUE, compilation fails because no import library is generated during the build.

To reproduce, open the "Command Shell" provided with the toolchain and run

cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=TRUE
nmake

Full log at http://ci.kicad-pcb.org/job/windows-sisl-msvc/cpu=x86,label=windows/10/console

[cbernardo]

This is due to the fact that __declspec(dllexport) and __declspec(dllimport) are only present in the forward declarations (sisl.h) and not present in the function definitions.

As an intermediate workaround there is a "sisl_exports.def" in my IGES library project (https://github.com/cbernardo/libIGES) and also a patch (0001-sisl.patch) discriminating MSVC and allowing an MSWin build via MSVC or MinGW. With the patch in place and the sisl_exports.def, I configure and build with:

cmake -G "VisualStudio 12 2013 Win64" -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=TRUE -DCMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS="/DEF:../sisl_exports.def" ..

cmake --build . -- /p:Configuration=Release

Of course it will be more convenient to have the export declaration in the source definition files themselves but that is a fairly big job since at least 172 functions needs to be altered for this. However, for future maintainability it is best to update the source definitions; for such a long list of exported functions, maintaining the export definition file would be error prone.

[GyrosGeier]

That should be unnecessary -- exports work fine when just one declaration with the export attribute is in scope.