I am using Windows 10 with mingw-w64. I tried compiling a program with a statically linked library. I used this command: g++ main.cpp -Llibs/ -lfoo. But MinGW says it can't find the library files, so I tried renaming foo.a to foo.lib and voila, the compiler found foo.lib. Why doesn't MinGW see *.a files anymore?
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From the documentation:
when ld is called with the argument ‘-lxxx’ it will attempt to find, in the first directory of its search path,
- libxxx.dll.a
- xxx.dll.a
- libxxx.a
- xxx.lib
- libxxx.lib
- cygxxx.dll
- libxxx.dll
- xxx.dll
Alternatively, you can pass libs/foo.a directly as an argument to g++.
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The problem is that mingw will not look for <libname>.a files because it does not expect them to exist.
From the docs:
MinGW supports libraries named according to the ".lib" and ".dll" conventions, in addition to the normal "lib.a" convention common on *nix systems
This is because windows does not use the lib prefix for its libraries in the same way that *nix does (on windows a shared library foo would be foo.dll and on *nix it would be libfoo.so). I am not sure how you managed to get a .a missing the lib prefix (unless you renamed it) but your .a files should have a lib prefix in them (when specifying this you omit the lib part so libfoo.a becomes -lfoo)
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