Compile Minipar programs on Windows

I was trying to compile the pdemo program comes with Minipar on both Linux and Windows XP. Minipar supplied a library file to be linked to your program, which is minipar.lib for Windows and libminipar.a for Linux.

I created a project using Visual Studio 2008. When building the project, many link errors showed up. Finally I found out that the Minipar library was compiled long time ago with Visual Studio 2003. In VS2008, the definitions of some standard library string functions have changed a little bit. (The difference is between “thiscall” and “_cdecl“.) So I have to find a copy of VS2003 and successfully compiled the pdemo program.

error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol “public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xran(void)const ” (?_Xran@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ) minipar.lib

Here are something to remember.
1. Use Multi-threaded option in Code Generation in the Project Property Page.
2. Add the following line to the beginning of your program.

#pragma comment(lib, “ws2_32.lib”)

Otherwise, you will have some link errors of _htonl, which look like

minipar.lib(strbufs.obj) : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _htonl@4 referenced in function “public: void __thiscall StrBufs::push_int(int const &)” (?push_int@StrBufs@@QAEXABH@Z)

If you would like to download the pdemo.exe, you can find it here. (Note, you still need the data files from Minipar to run this program.)