shared extension in windows build

[pizzaadoough]

Hi! Is it possible to build a static-php-cli for Windows that still supports dynamic extension loading?

[henderkes]

Windows binaries always support extension loading. For all windows does wrong, the dev landscape on windows is 100000000000000000000000000000x better than the one on linux and macos. No limitations for static linking, no version incompatibilities, everything just works.

[pizzaadoough]

I successfully built both TS and NTS binaries on Windows and tested dynamic loading using the command: buildroot/bin/php -d "extension=ixed.8.1.win" --ri sourceguardian. I also tried it with the TS version, but the extension didn’t load.

Any idea what might be going wrong?

Thanks btw.

[henderkes]

Extension loading works a bit differently on windows: https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.pecl.windows.php

You need to specify the dll including the extension.

[henderkes]

(and possibly the full path, unless it's in the extension dir that you compiled php with)

[pizzaadoough]

I’ve tried both methods—using the absolute path and the default C:\php\ext — with the TS and NTS DLLs in place, but no luck. Meanwhile, the GNU build worked just fine and loaded the library without issues. The library I’m referring to is from SourceGuardian.

GNU version :

Windows info :

[henderkes]

Hmm, I don't know then, sorry. Maybe it's a php configure setting that disables loading extensions? Windows runtimes, both static and dynamic, allow loading of shared libraries.

[pizzaadoough]

No worries at all, I really appreciate you taking the time to help! I’ll keep experimenting. Thanks again.

It would be awesome if Windows builds also had hybrid capability for loading libraries.

[henderkes]

They definitely should. My main development happens on windows with fully static binaries and they load shared libraries just fine. dlopen (the pendant to LoadLibrary on Windows) is just messed up on the standard libraries from linux and macos in the sense that glibc and macos' system libraries refuse to link dlopen statically at all and static musl has dlopen implemented as a noop.