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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T09:51:30+00:00

I’m building static libraries (right now libpng ) in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

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I’m building static libraries (right now libpng) in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Do I have any possibility to build single library (one file) for both Debug and Release modes assuming that my library has only C code in it?

As far as I remember, gtkmm, for instance, has it’s pre-built package, where C++ based libraries are shipped in both Debug and Release versions, but other – as a single file only.

E.g. they have gtkmm-vc90-d-2_4.lib and gtkmm-vc90-2_4.lib files for C++ based libraries and they have single libraries such as gtk-win32-2.0.lib for both Debug and Release configurations.

How can I achieve the same effect? What should I do to make the built library (pure C) configuration-independent?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In theory you could build just one library if all the external headers for the library (ie the ones pulled in by the client) don’t use #ifdef _DEBUG (or any other macro that may be defined in a debug build but not a release build.

    Consider a case like this: 

    // file: mylib.h
struct A {
   int member1;
   int member2;
   #ifdef _DEBUG
     int extraDebugOption;
   #endif
};

    In this case, if you were to link the library into a debug build of your own product then A will have a different size to the release build, which means you’re going to have some pretty horrendous memory corruption bugs to track down (been there…).

    EDIT:
    Forgot to mention, you should make your one configuration a Release configuration so that you don’t end up with any references to the debug CRT, and also so the library is optimised. As lsalamon points out, creating a pdb file and saving this along with your .lib file will be useful in the future for debugging.

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