Question

This post and this post says that with Visual Studio, the run time library can be static/dynamic, and it shouldn’t be mixed. Even one can have debugging version/release version for the library. And there are four possibilities (static/dynamic and debug/release).

So, with Visual Studio, the library provider has to provide four different versions of the same library?

ADDED

I tried to link CppUnit test (debug) with release build library, and I got an error. So, I wondered normally library provider might need to provide all the possible combination of libraries.

Answer 1

depends..
under normal cicrcumstances you only provide a realease version. Then you have the option for static/dynamic. In the case of static, you don’t have to provide anything since it’s static: your lib already contains all functions from the crt it needs. In case of dynamic, it also depends: if you expect your clients to build applications using your lib, they already should have the required lib on their build machine. Else, yes, you can provide them with a crt installer for the dynamic release version (or just ship the corresponding dlls but that’s considered rather bad practice)

Also if I remember correctly, you cannot redistribute the debug versions of VS’s debug libraries, so in the end this would mean the library provider should only provide one version.