Hi, Newton provides a .a file in their library. My game, however - is .NET. I would like to wrap Newton and use it in my engine, but this requires a .so file, which is not provided. Is it possible for me to "roll my own" ? I do not have source code, only the library file and the headers.

I don't think that's possible. As well as being built as a shared library (-shared), .so must contain position-independent code and as such must be compiled specially. So, unless the library has been compiled with -fPIC (even though it's still a static lib), I doubt it's going to work.

Aight - thanks for the snappy reply Fruny, I'll pass this information on to the Newton developer :)

well, you could try:

ld --whole-archive -share -o foo.so foo.a

/Nico

Quote: Original post by Fruny
I don't think that's possible. As well as being built as a shared library (-shared), .so must contain position-independent code and as such must be compiled specially. So, unless the library has been compiled with -fPIC (even though it's still a static lib), I doubt it's going to work.

It can work, I did it once for some X library that my dist decided for some obscure reason to supply as .a only. I didn't do it exactly like NicoDeLuciferi (though his way probably works), I just extracted al the .o files from the lib with ar, and then instructed ld to build a shared library out of them. I didn't have any problems using the resulting .so.