Generating .def files (WIndows)

[johne53 (John Emmas)]

Back in the old Gtk-2 days I built the Gtk stack for someone (still 32-bit in those days). The libraries included a gendef app for generating .def files but when we eventually migrated to 64-bit, gendef didn’t work so well and it was decided to switch to gcc which doesn’t need those pesky .def files.

But on taking another look at this recently, I noticed that the app is actually called gendef32.exe - so maybe it was never intended for 64-bit builds? Is there anywhere where I can download a more recent version of gendef (preferably pre-built) just to experiment with?

[lb90]

Hi @johne53,

gendef is part of the mingw-w64 project: mingw-w64/mingw-w64-tools/gendef at master · mingw-w64/mingw-w64 · GitHub.

It’s available in many environments, for example:

• mingw-w64-x86_64-tools-git in MSYS2
• mingw-w64-tools in Fedora

As you can see from the linked websites, both packages provide a single binary named gendef.

Speaking generally, 32 may refer to the Win32 subsystem, as opposed to the way older Win16 subsystem.

[johne53 (John Emmas)]

Hi @lb90 - I think one of our devs uses mingw so I’ll ask if he’s ever tried the gendef app (tho’ I didn’t think .def files were needed by gcc / mingw ). Many thanks.