Switch std to using raw-dylib by default on Windows by ChrisDenton · Pull Request #129821 · rust-lang/rust (original) (raw)

I'm in favor of switching to raw-dylib - it makes it easier to use Rust in places where the Windows SDK may not be available (non-Windows platforms, folks don't want to install it or when building Windows itself).

My concern with switching to raw-dylib is that we lose what little verification we got from the import libraries, turning linker failures into crashes at startup

1. Verification that a name exists.
2. Verification that the API is available in a given Windows version (assuming we were building with an old enough Windows SDK).
3. For x86 stdcall, the name mangling added some checking of parameters (the total size of the parameters was part of the decoration).

For 1 and 3, this is easily mitigated by avoiding hand-written bindings and using windows-bindgen instead (which the standard library mostly already does).

For 2, @kennykerr do you know if there's enough detail in the metadata to be able to expose Windows SDK versions as crate features (e.g., forcing windows-rs to only expose APIs available in a given Windows version?)