creating shared dlls yields undefined reference to `WinMain@16' in mingw 4.3

Thu Dec 18 17:03:00 GMT 2008

GetProcAddress can be used to find the address of a function if it is 
exported, though WinMain is generally not exported. Windows processes are 
started with an entry point address that comes from the exe header, not from 
a symbol. I tried searching an exe for WinMain with grep and then looked 
for symbols with dumpbin and didn't find anything.
I am not sure how it helps to have an address for WinMain though. If I 
understand things properly, this is being used to backtrace the stack for 
exception information. Unless I am wrong and there is compatibility between 
MS and GCC call stacks, this won't be able to trace back to WinMain anyway.
Daniel
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andrew Haley" <aph@redhat.com>
To: "Daniel Walter" <d2walter@hotmail.com>
Cc: "Danny Smith" <dansmister@gmail.com>; <java@gcc.gnu.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 5:16 AM
Subject: Re: creating shared dlls yields undefined reference to `WinMain@16' 
in mingw 4.3
> Daniel Walter wrote:
>> Thank you for all the help on this. For anyone who is searching the
>> archives for MinGW gcj information, I will summarize.
>>>> 1. If you are trying to build a dll in MinGW, you may need to make a
>> dummy WinMain function.
>> This is wrong, though. Surely someone knows if Windows has something
> like dlsym().
>> Andrew.
>