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Asked: 2026-05-12T19:04:01+00:00

I’ve got a really odd error message that only occurs when I add the

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I’ve got a really odd error message that only occurs when I add the following line to my project:

std::list<CRect> myVar;

It’s worth noting that it doesn’t have to be a std::list, it can be std::vector or any other STL container I assume.

Here is the error message:

Error 1 error LNK2005: “public:
__thiscall std::list

::list >(void)”
(??0?$list@VCRect@@V?$allocator@VCRect@@@std@@@std@@QAE@XZ)
already defined in
SomeLowLevelLibrary.lib

The low level library that’s referenced in the error message has no idea about the project I am building, it only has core low level functionality and doesn’t deal with high level MFC GUIs.

I can get the linker error to go away if I change the line of code to:

std::list<CRect*> myVar;

But I don’t want to hack it for the sake of it.

Also, it doesn’t matter if I create the variable on the stack or the heap, I still get the same error.

Does anyone have any ideas whatsoever about this?
I’m using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on Vista Enterprise.

Edit: The linker error above is for the std::list<> constructor, I also get an error for the destructor, _Nextnode and clear functions.

Edit: In other files in the project, std::vector won’t link, in other files it might be std::list. I can’t work out why some containers work, and some don’t. MFC linkage is static across both libraries. In the low level library we have 1 class that inherits from std::list.

Edit: The low level library doesn’t have any classes that inherit from CRect, but it does make use of STL.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I recently stumbled across this error again in our project and decided to have a more thorough investigation compared to just patching it up with a hack like last time (swap std::list for CArray). It turns out that one of our low level libraries was inheriting from std::list, e.g.

    class LIB_EXPORT CRectList : public std::list<CRect>
{
};

    This is not just bad practice, but it also was the cause of the linker errors in the main application. I change CRectList to wrap std::list rather than inherit from it and the error went away.

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