unresolved external symbol main (no underscore)

Question

I'm trying to compile a C program (specifically, the Python interpreter) as a plain statically linked 64-bit Windows binary. My command line looks like this:

cl /DPy_BUILD_CORE ... /link Advapi32.lib Shell32.lib User32.lib

where ... is the long list of source files and include directory specifications, and the library specifications I added as necessary to fix unresolved symbol errors. I'm now getting this error:

LIBCMT.lib(crt0.obj) : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol main referenced in function __tmainCRTStartup

You might think this question has been asked before, but in this case main is spelled without a leading _ - something that doesn't happen in any of the other occurrences I could find with a Google search. Just to be sure, I tried writing a minimal main() function and throwing it in, and that still gave the above error plus a duplicate symbol warning, so that's not what's missing.

Any idea what's wrong here?

Answer 1

您尝试像使用入口点（不是静态链接库）的应用程序一样对其进行编译。

Answer 2

From Jeremy Kloth on the python-win32 mailing list:

The list of files also needs "..\\Modules\\python.c" to create an executable. (tested with VS2008 for x64).

That lack of leading underscore comes from how symbols are exported in 64-bit PEs vs. 32-bit PEs. That is, 64-bit PEs do not prepend an underscore to exported symbols.