From: Steven Jenkins <steven.jenkins@...>
Date: 2005-04-12T16:30:31+09:00
Subject: extensions on Windows

I could use some help from someone who knows Windows.

We use a commercial system engineering tool here at work. It has a C API
that I've wrapped with SWIG and successfully made into an extension on
Linux. The vendor's Linux library is static, but building it into the
Ruby interpreter is straightforward. It works well.

Some of my colleagues would like to use this extension on Windows. I run
Cygwin with Ruby on my Windows machine, but the vendor's DLL was built
with a Microsoft compiler. I played around for a couple of hours with
trying to get gcc to link against a MS DLL and got nowhere, so I
installed the One-Click Ruby for Windows and downloaded MS Visual C++
Toolkit 2003. After another couple of hours, it seemed I needed to also
install something called the Platform SDK. OK, did that, but now it
fails to find MSVCRT.lib when linking.

What am I missing? Is there some simple way to set up an environment
that can compile a single .c file, link against a DLL, and make a shared
object for Ruby?

Any help appreciated.

Steve