Issues with LIB files (a riff on Raymond Chen)

Today's The Old New Thing blog talks about a subject near and dear to my heart: why the Microsoft Linker needs some TLC when it comes to making lib files.

Let's back up.  What's a lib file, and why do they exist?  Well, a long time ago, computer programmers decided that the mechanics of converting what a programmer writes into what a computer understands should be done in two steps: a compiler turns the "source file" (what the programmer wrote) into a "object file" (a temporary file).  Then a linker turns the object file into a program.  It turns out that in general compiling is much slower than linking, and that most programs are composed of many source files, and that you don't have to re-compile a source file that hasn't changed.  So if your program consists of a hundred source files, and you change one, you only have to compile one, and then link them all together, and you get a program.

Now the twist come in: with bigger projects, it's handy to lump all of the object files together into a "lib" (library) file.  That way you don't have to tell the linker about all of your files; you just point it to the one lib file.

That's where the Microsoft Linker falls down, badly.  A common pattern for using lib files is to split the people using the lib file from the people who are making it.  As such, I want to pack my lib files with "everything" the user might want to use.  

But you can't.

As Raymond Chen points out in his (much better) blog , The Old New Thing, today (link: 

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/12/29/9255240.aspx), it's eay to compile a file one way, put it into a library, and have a user compiling and linking another way to almost but not quite use your symbol.  It's very frustrating and requires a bit more fixing ability then we should expect end-programmers to have.

There are three things I'd like to see with the linker:

1. On failure, the linker should try a fuzzy match ("I didn't find 'xyz' but I did see 'xyxz@4')
2. The linker should keep track of how all of the files are being compiled ('the library was linked with /FOO but you are compiling with /NOTFOO)
3. A library should be "stuffable" with all of the different versions of a file -- I should be able to pop in the unicode and ansi, debug and release, statically linked and dynamically linked versions of all of my files. 

The goal, of course, is to let me as a library-creator make a library that other people can "just use" -- not "just use with a lot of swearing".

About Me and Where I Work

Thanks to the local economy, I recently was part of a layoff at a company which I'll simply describe at the "Purple Company".  People who work there will know what I mean.  Luckily I picked up a new job very quickly as (cue ominous music) one of the networking people for Microsoft.

I wouldn't bother mentioning it, but at the NEO (New Employee Orientation -- everything at MSFT has an acronym) it was mentioned -- and repeated -- and then emphasized:

We can write a blog.  MSFT likes us to write blogs.  But the legal staff is worried about looking sneaky, and they'd like all of us MSFT bloggers to mention that we are, indeed, MSFT employees.

So there.  I work at Microsoft.  I won't put in a disclaimer that I don't speak for Microsoft because IMHO that should be the default legal status on the internet.  And you'll see from previous entries that I've been definite about MSFT's poor documentation (and sometimes bizarre code).