MinGW : Boost.Thread defaults to DLL linkage

[Cyril Othenin-Girard <cog@…>]

I compile boost-1.48 with GCC 4.6.1 using MinGW-32 3.10 on Windows XP.

I confirm the last comment of WFrane in ticket #4614 :

Replying to anthonyw:

Static linking seems to work fine now #4258 is fixed.

It appears that adding #define BOOST_THREAD_USE_LIB before other boost thread-related preprocessor directives is still required for static linking when using MinGW (tested using Boost 1.45.0 and MinGW 4.4.1).

I also built BOOST libraries as static ones (which is the default on MinGW).

Nevertheless, I have to explicitly add -DBOOST_THREAD_USE_LIB to my project makefile to avoid a lot of warnings like :

boost-1.48/thread/win32/thread_heap_alloc.hpp:59:40: warning: inline function 'void* boost::detail::allocate_raw_heap_memory(unsigned int)' declared as  dllimport: attribute ignored [-Wattributes]
boost-1.48/thread/win32/thread_heap_alloc.hpp:69:39: warning: inline function 'void boost::detail::free_raw_heap_memory(void*)' declared as  dllimport: attribute ignored [-Wattributes]

This is not required on other Win32 platforms.

Now than MinGW has Thread-Local-Storage automatic clean-up (confirmation needed), is it possible to default to static library linkage instead of DLL ?

[Cyril Othenin-Girard <cog@…>]

My source on TLS cleanup : ​http://lists-archives.org/mingw-users/21781-how-best-to-create-multiple-threads-in-mingw.html.

... because our (mingw.org) native thread cleanup code now employs TLS too ...

but I do not if they refer to MinGW-32 or MinGW-32/64.

[viboes]

I don't know which should be the default, and this must documented. I guess that this could be considered a duplicate of #4921 BOOST_THREAD_USE_DLL and BOOST_THREAD_USE_LIB are crucial and need to be documented