Question

What is standard or “most-popular” naming convention for MSVC library builds.

For example, for following platforms library foo has these conventions:

Linux/gcc:

shared: libfoo.so
import: ---
static: libfoo.a

Cygwin/gcc:

shared: cygfoo.dll
import: libfoo.dll.a
static: libfoo.a

Windows/MinGW:

shared: libfoo.dll
import: libfoo.dll.a
static: libfoo.a

What should be used for MSVC buidls? As far as I know, usually names are foo.dll and foo.lib, but how do you usually distinguish between import library and static one?

Note: I ask because CMake creates quite unpleasant collision between them naming both import and static library as foo.lib. See bug report. The answer would
help me to convince the developers to fix this bug.

Answer 1

You distinguish between a library and a .dll by the extension. But you distinguish between a import library and a static library by the filename, not the extension.

There will be no case where an import library exists for a set of code that was built to be a static library, or where a static library exists for a dll. These are two different things.

There is no single MSVC standard filename convention. As a rule, a library name that ends in “D” is often a debug build of library code, msvcrtd.dll vs msvcrt.dll but other than that, there are no standards.