Chris Yuen wrote:

Robert Ramey wrote:

...

These functions are not explicity called from the library. But they ARE called as part of the serialization process. Its just that MSVC doesn't see them. So when you compile for release, The MSVC Linker strips them out and the program won't work anymore. In order to work around this, these functions are explicitly exported. This prevents MSVC from stripping them out. For more information see force_include.hpp

Thanks for the pointer! I'm trying to circumvent the issue by replacing force_include.hpp with 2 lines:

#define BOOST_DLLEXPORT #define BOOST_USED

I'm not examining or not whether the resultant program will crash or not, yet. But still, even with force_include.hpp (supposedly) out of the way, I still see the swamp of exported symbols. How can I experiment with disabling this DLL export thingie?

Do I need to recompile boost::serialization for this change? I assumed not since the exported symbols are template instantiations which should only have happened when the client code compiled.

Is there any other ways around this? These exported symbols add a hideously huge amount of overhead to the final exe. I did the dumpbin and the output (which only contains the plain text names of the exported symbols) is 6MB!

Are you sure you're building in release mode?

Best regards, Chris Yuen