Using Windows DLLs in a portable application

Question

I created a Windows C ++ application that I would like to connect to Linux. The main reasons for this are the ease of system maintenance for our IT professionals. In addition to the one Windows machine that runs this application, we only work with linux.

The reason this application has been embedded and runs on windows is because it uses the windows API (dll and header) to connect to the server that belongs to the outside. This connection uses some kind of proprietary protocol that I really don't want to mess with (and I think I'm not allowed to negotiate), so I'm stuck with .dll.

This dll is windows only because of (I suspect) sockets windows sockets in a dll. In addition, he does not do many advanced things. Is there a way somewhere between running the linux application on WINE and sniffing the protocol and reimplementing the DLL itself, which will allow me to run this application on a Linux machine?

This idea got inspiration from this point about the creator of QT , so any solution that allows me to play with this would be cool.

Answer 1

The most obvious middle ground is using Winelib . I do not know if it can directly reference the native DLL, but if you cannot load it using LoadLibrary() .

Then you can split the application into two parts: a shell that calls only the DLL, and the rest of the code in your wrapper. You can have both in separate processes, and thus only the compiler needs to be compiled using Winelib. The rest of the application could use whatever structure you want.