Question

I recently inherited a project which I’ve cleaned up and finished. However, there is one annoying issue that is just bugging the heck out of me. Whenever I build it, it creates a static library (*.lib + *.exp files) alongside the *.exe. The *.lib file is unnecessary. I can’t for the life of me find where in the settings to turn this off. It doesn’t hurt anything to build it, it’s just annoying.

Answer 1

I had the same problem, and since I’m a very pedantic person, I mind. So I used

dumpbin /EXPORTS the_naughty_file.lib

On the unwanted .lib file, and it reveals:

Microsoft (R) COFF/PE Dumper Version 9.00.21022.08
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Dump of file E:\my-projects\Robotics\SLAM_plus_plus\bin\Release\SLAM_plus_plus6.lib

File Type: LIBRARY

     Exports

       ordinal    name

                  ??4_Init_locks@std@@QAEAAV01@ABV01@@Z (public: class std::_Init_locks & __thiscall std::_Init_locks::operator=(class std::_Init_locks const &))

  Summary

      DB .debug$S
      14 .idata$2
      14 .idata$3
       4 .idata$4
       4 .idata$5
      14 .idata$6

And after a while of googling, I found a post, explaining this is an automatically generated function, which is only generated when using dynamically-linked runtime library (static doesn’t do that).

To fix the problem, either go to Project Properties > C ++ > Preprocessor, and add:

_STATIC_CPPLIB

Or go to Project Properties > C ++ > Code Generation and change Runtime Library to Multithreaded (MT).

The annoying files are now gone, yay :). Tested in Visual Studio 2008, though. But if it doesn’t work, just use dumpbin /EXPORTS on the .lib to trace exports and post them here.