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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T23:29:35+00:00

Is there any way to make static libraries built in Microsoft Visual Studio independent

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Is there any way to make static libraries built in Microsoft Visual Studio independent from used CRT (with debug support / without it)?

I mean like, for simple C library it is possible to generate code using gcc and then use the same static library in visual studio. The resulting library.a file is completely independent from /MT or /MDd switches and does not result in warning / linking errors.

Comparing to Visual Studio default behaviour, you would have to build two versions of the same library – for Debug / Release modes independently. If you try to use the Release version in Debug configuration or vice-versa, this results in ugly warnings (warning LNK4098: defaultlib "LIBCMT" ...), but sometimes does not compile due to different runtimes?

Is there any way to avoid this? Or probably I’m doing something wrong?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To make a lib that will link in regardless of runtime selection it is necessary to use two switches:

    /MT to build against the basic release runtime, /Zl to omit the default library names.

    Building against the dll runtimes will cause the compiler to decorate all the runtime symbols with __imp_ (so, for example, it will try and link against __imp__fread rather than _fread). So you have to choose one of the static runtimes.

    The compiler does an implicit default library pragma, depending on the lib selected:

    #pragma comment(lib,"libcmtd.lib")

    is how it looks in code. The /Zl causes the compiler to omit all these directives – (implicit and explicit) from the resulting .obj (and hence .lib) file. So the result will should link cleanly without causing default library conflicts.

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