.lib & .a extensions

[billinares]

Hello

Does anyone know the difference between libraries with .lib and those with .a extension?

I use Eclipse CDT for coding. A library compiled with Eclipse has .a extension; Visual Studio seems to use .lib.

Thanks

[kbw]

The .a is almost certainly a static library. It's a Unix convention.

The Unix convention for static libraries is libname.a, and for shared libraries libname.so.

The Windows convention for static libraries and the (static) stub for dynamic link libraries is name.lib and for DLLs name.dll. It should be noted that different kinds of DLLs are sometimes given different extensions.