Question about using Visual Studio when building CSFML

[Jebbs]

I had this issue when I was building my modified version of CSFML, but I also encountered this when I built CSFML too. Before I go farther I want to mention that I have only used MingW so far to compile my stuff, and this is my first experience with building SFML with VS. Basically the "problem" I am experiencing is that I am able to build the SFML static libraries no problem, but when I build the CSFML dll's, VS doesn't seem to actually link the static libraries into the shared libraries when it builds them. I only noticed this because the size of my dll's were quite small. Is there something I need to do in order to get this to happen?

Some info:

I'm not using NMake. I'm having CMake create Project files and I just open those up in VS to build them.
I'm using VS 11.

Thanks in advance for the help!

[Laurent]

VS doesn't seem to actually link the static libraries into the shared libraries when it builds them. I only noticed this because the size of my dll's were quite small

And? Did you try them? What error(s) do you get?

[Jebbs]

VS doesn't seem to actually link the static libraries into the shared libraries when it builds them. I only noticed this because the size of my dll's were quite small

And? Did you try them? What error(s) do you get?

Huh, they seem to work. 

They are MUCH smaller than the ones you have for download though which is a little confusing to me. Maybe it's just a build setting I'm not aware of.

[Laurent]

The ones in the official packages are compiled with standard library linked statically. That's why they are bigger than yours.

[Ixrec]

Does linking the standard library statically improve compatibility or something?

[Laurent]

It removes the very last dependencies, so that the CSFML DLLs depend on nothing at runtime (other than the sfml-audio LGPL dependencies: libsndfile and OpenAL) and can be used on any system with any compiler.

[Jebbs]

The ones in the official packages are compiled with standard library linked statically. That's why they are bigger than yours.

I thought I was. I use the CMake gui, and for both SFML and CSFML I have the box checked for using static std libs.

It works though, so I guess that's all I should worry about.

It removes the very last dependencies, so that the CSFML DLLs depend on nothing at runtime (other than the sfml-audio LGPL dependencies: libsndfile and OpenAL) and can be used on any system with any compiler.

And since I am using them for a binding in a different language, this is important.

[Laurent]

You should check the dependencies of your CSFML binaries, with Dependency Walker. If there's no msvxxx.dll then it's good.

[Jebbs]

I just used Dependency Walker like you suggested. Never used it before so I'm not sure if I'm reading it correctly, but I see msvcrt.dll in a couple of places. That's the only msvxxx.dll I see.

I would like to have the dll's free of any external dependencies, but I am very unfamiliar with Visual Studio. Is there something I missed in CMake?

[Laurent]

It depends where you saw those msvcrt.dll. At top-level? Or as a dependency of a system DLL?

[Jebbs]

It's listed as a dependency of a couple of dll's. See attached for a couple examples.

In the future I'm going to test things myself before I post here though.

[Laurent]

If it's a dependency of system DLLs then everything's ok on your side.