Re: Making MzScheme extensions using VC++ 5.0?

[Matthew Flatt <mflatt@cs.utah.edu>]

I've had mostly good experience with MSVC 6, but never tried MSVC 5.
Others have reported a similar "Internal error" message with MSVC 5. I
wonder whether it's an incompatibility in the .obj format, since
mzdyn.obj (as distributed) was built with MSVC 6.

Quoting Paul Fernhout:
> So, I made my own project to build an Win32 DLL.
> [...]
> Any suggestions?  It seems that the "escheme.h" header is insufficient
> for Windows. I think the alternative is to have a seperate export file,

mzc does indeed use an export file:
  plt/collects/mzscheme/lib/win32/i386/msvc/mzdyn.exp

You can run mzc wth the -v flag to see exactly how it's calling cl.exe.

> Or is it time to switch to GCC?

Yes, I expect you'll find more success with Cygwin. The Cygwin
interface for DLLs is messy, but mzc knows how work with it.

If you have both MSVC and Cygwin installed, use "--tool gcc" to get mzc
to use Cygwin.

Matthew