C Run Time Libraries in Windows

["Antonio Scuri" <scuri@...>]

  Hi,

  Here are some thoughts about it, in the context of the Lua for Windows
distribution.

  The Visual C++ RTL are very hard to install since version 8.0 (Visual
Studio 2005). And this continues in newer versions and it doesn't seems that
it will change for future versions.

  MingW still uses the MSVCRT.DLL, which is already installed on the system,
but it is known to have some bugs.

  As already pointed out, in Windows people like to use Visual Studio. But
each Visual Studio version has its own version of the RTL, making things
difficult.

  Some libraries maybe very hard or impossible to build using MingW.

>>>  Why not to use both?   <<<<

  Mixed RTLs can be dangerous, but if used carefully works very well. An
example, I use GTK in Windows to speed up some IUP tests before going to
Linux. The same GTK dlls, and import libraries, work with all Visual Studio
versions I have. They all depend on MSVCTR.DLL, because they were build with
MingW.

  I think that there are some Lua modules that need to interchange pointers
and/or pointers to structures like FILE*. For those modules they all must
use the same RTL. But their use by a Lua application may not have that need.

  If this is true, we can safely move to MSVCRT.DLL, for most of the
modules. This should not stop an application to use them. And if a module
needs to be built in Visual Studio, it always has the option to use the
static version of the RTL.

  Anyway, just a starting point for a discussion.

Best,
Scuri