如何在MinGW或GCC中自动链接库？

Question

When a custom library is used in the code, it requires -l linker parameter to use:

gcc myprogram.c -lmylibrary

Is there a way to convince MinGW linker to check header files and automatically find and link a library in /lib folder? Or is there a reason why it would be a bad idea?

Answer 1

No.

The problem of looking at C source code and figuring out which libraries it uses is very hard. It feels kind of "AI complete" to me, which is why it's typically solved manually by the programmer pointing out the exact right libraries to satisfy the dependencies with.

Imagine for mylibrary , it's easy to imagine a system with both mylibrary 1.x and 2.x versions installed, and some calls are named exactly the same. Now try to imagine a computer program capable of deducing what you meant, which library to link with. It's not possible, since only the programmer knows.

The pkg-config tool helps with the mechanics of what each library requires in order to be used, but it's still up to you to tell it (via the module name argument(s)) which exact libraries to use.