Sohail Somani wrote:

[mailto:boost-users-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of

...

Vladimir Prus

...

I suppose because on Linux, it's not typical to have several variants. And if you have just one variant, using

-lwhatever

Is it typical on Windows because of the way Microsoft set up the C++ runtime libraries?

I can't recall ever seeing a single-threaded version of the g++ runtimes.

That's pretty much it. Each Microsoft compiler includes multiple versions of the runtime library, and it can be a severe problem if different modules in your program autolink to different versions. Imagine the heap corruption if you use the release malloc to allocate a variable and the debug free to release it. The problem is actually somewhat reduced in Visual Studio 8. It now only has 4 versions of the C runtime (all combinations of debug or release, static or dynamic, multithreaded only). Previous versions also had single-threaded, static runtime libraries. You can also run into problems by linking a library compiled with, say, Visual Studio 7 with a program compiled with Visual Studio 8, as each version has its own set of runtime libraries. Fortunately, this tends to be a moot point with C++, as the function name mangling changes from one version of the compiler to the next, so the link will probably fail anyway. Fortunately, UNIX doesn't have such a schizophrenic runtime library, so you're pretty much assured of compatibility.