Including external DLL dependencies in your dll project?

Question

A person on my team is currently working on a C DLL which relies on MKL math library DLLs. We're a little confused about something though.

This question is more about the standard way of dealing with dependent DLL's when you're building your own DLL.

Let's say:

• Our program is written/compiled in Visual studio as a C program
• It relies on MKL DLLs written in C++ (works fine)
• How does the person using our DLL get MKL? Should we somehow include it in our DLL? Do we tell them to separately get that? Will separately getting it even work that way? I wasn't sure if them importing our DLL and the MKL DLL would make our DLL correctly detect MKL.

Answer 1

Assuming the MKL DLLs have a license that allows you to redistribute them with your DLL, the simplest answer is just to include them with it. As long as Windows finds your DLL, putting all the DLLs - yours and MKL's - together will mean it finds the MKL DLLs just the same way.

( Edit : Judging by Which Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL) libraries are "Redistributables"? , that should be fine.)