MingW, MSVC, GFortran: Link libraries

fem_dev

I'm developing a main Qt GUI C++ application that calls some Fortran-90 functions and subroutines inside of it.

This application must be cross-platform: Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

I know that my C++ compiler MUST be compatible with my Fortran compiler.
So, to build my application I'm thinking of use these combinations below:

For Windows 10:

C++: MSVC++ 2019
Fortran: Intel Fortran Compiler 2019

For Linux (Ubuntu 20.04):

C++: GCC 9.3
Fortran: gfortran 9.3

For OSX:

C++: GCC 9.3
Fortran: gfortran 9.3

Looking this info above, I think that will be good to try to use a single compilers pair to ALL targets.

So, using Qt Maintenance I downloaded and installed the Mingw-w64-8.1 compilers and tools.

My first problem using the Qt + MingW is that:
My Qt project need to link some libraries.
The Windows compiled static libraries are in the project folder and the file extension is *.lib
The Linux and OSX libraries are in the project include paths.

Trying to build a Windows binary with GCC:

When I use Qt + MSVC...I got no linker errors and all works fine.
But when change the Qt configurations to use Qt + Mingw the linker starts to search for a *.a library and NOT a *.lib library.

I'm a little bit confuse. I downloaded MingW to be possible to generate Windows builds using GCC. In that way, I think that the linker libraries should be the same as always *.lib. Right?

What is wrong?

Thank,

My systems are:

System A:

Windows 10 x64
Qt Creator 4.12.4
Qt 5.15

System B:

Ubuntu 20.04 x64
Qt Creator 4.12.4
Qt 5.15

System C:

OSX Catalina
Qt Creator 4.12.4
Qt 5.15

Christian Ehrlicher

@fem_dev said in MingW, MSVC, GFortran: Link libraries:

Right?

No.

MSVC uses .lib suffix for import libs, MinGW/gcc .a
And since you can't mix MSVC and MinGW/gcc c++ libraries you have to compile all dependencies with the same compiler.

use a single compilers pair to ALL targets.

I don't understand this - do you try to cross-compile?

fem_dev

@Christian-Ehrlicher Ok! I understood now.