Visual studio 2015 run-time dependencies or how to get rid of Universal CRT?

user_2338477 0
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Compiled couple of .dll's using visual studio 2015, and tried to deploy on some older windows 7 / 64 bit. Tried also to guess which dll's are needed for application to start and copied MSVCP140.DLL & VCRUNTIME140.DLL - but application could not load vs2015 dll. Started to analyze what is wrong - and dependency walker showed dependencies from following dll's:

API-MS-WIN-CRT-MATH-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CRT-HEAP-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CRT-CONVERT-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CRT-STRING-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CRT-STDIO-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CRT-RUNTIME-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CRT-FILESYSTEM-L1-1-0.DLL
API-MS-WIN-CRT-TIME-L1-1-0.DLL

This was especially surprising since to my best understanding CRT is responsible for starting dll/exe, it does not provide any higher level services.

Ok, tried to figure out how to get rid of them or at least to minimize.

Found one article: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/03/03/introducing-the-universal-crt/

It mentions about release static libraries - so I thought that I could link against them and get rid from *L1-1-0.DLL* dependency hell, but no matter what I have tried - I had no success. I've tried to link against libvcruntime.lib, libucrt.lib, libcmt.lib, tried to disable using linker option "/nodefaultlib:vcruntime.lib", and even tried to add include directory $(UniversalCRT_IncludePath), and also overriding some of define's as I have tried to guess they works - none of my attempts helped.

As an intermediate solution I've fall back to using Visual studio 2013, where CRT dll's are only two: msvcp120.dll, msvcr120.dll.

Of course you will probably recommend to install Visual studio 2015 run-times, but one of our requirement is to support standalone executable - which works without any installation - so additional installation is out of question for now.

Can you recommend me anything else than to wait Visual studio 2017 to arrive ?

msvcrt visual-studio-2015 c++
6 Answers

Setting: Configuration Properties - Advanced - Use of MFC - "Use MFC in a Static Library" worked for me (with a console application - not a MFC/ATL application per-se).

user_16079370

If you're not trying to replace the Runtime with your own then it doesn't matter whether

  • You have Runtime Typing enabled/disabled
  • You have C++ Exceptions enabled/disabled
  • Whether you have the Runtime Library set to Multithreaded DLL or not (setting it to non-DLL is still building it into your binary)

The only thing you need to ensure is that you don't use any of its capabilities and Visual Studio automatically doesn't link to it. Ie. No asserts, no calls to anything in string.h or stdio.h, nothing. Anything the compiler can replace with its own intrinsics tho is ok, as are compiler checks like static_assert.

user_5103550
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