Why do I see a MSVCR90 dependency even though I set the /MT option?

5
votes

I'm building a DLL in Visual C++ 2008, and I want to have the runtime statically linked into the DLL. So I went into the project options and set Runtime Library to Multi-threaded (/MT). This has always worked for other projects in the past. But when I build this one, I still end up with Dependency Walker showing MSVCR90.dll in the list.

Anyone know what could cause that?

1
cvisual-c++visual-c++-2008
Clearly the EXE that loads your DLL was not built with the same option. Or another DLL that got loaded, it takes only one. – Hans Passant
@Hank: Not applicable here. I'm looking at it in Dependency Walker, and it shows at the top level of the tree, not under another loaded DLL. – Mason Wheeler
What export(s) in MSVCR90 is your DLL dependent on? – Michael Burr

1 Answers

4
votes

Project + Properties, Linker, Command Line. Add the /verbose option. Build + Rebuild. The Output window shows you the linker searching for symbols. Watch out for msvcrt.lib, that's the one that pulls in the dependency on msvcr90.dll

The typical cause is linking a .lib that has one or more .obj files that were compiled with /MD. A dependency on msvcrt.lib gets injected with the #pragma comment(lib, msvcrt.lib) directive. That tells the linker to search msvcrt.lib without you explicitly specifying it as a dependency in Linker, Input, Additional Dependencies.