Re: improve support for building DLLs on cygwin and mingw

[Bruno Haible]

Danny Smith wrote:
> Thinking more about this, the whole problem goes away with
> -funit-at-a-time and that is turned on by default at 
> optimization level of 1 or higher.

Not the whole problem, only the case of a reference in the same compilation
unit as the definition of the variable.

> It seems that this problem is really a GCC vs MSVC compiler difference
> and it should be addressed in GCC rather in libtool.

The general case of a self-reference from another compilation unit inside
the same shared library cannot be addressed in GCC, without changing the
object file format. It needs to be done in the linker or in libtool.
Ralf explained why it's better done in libtool.

Bruno