Confusion about building dlls, g++ seems to do it right, but do I need "dlltool"?

[Karr, David]

I'm a little confused about the process of building and using dlls in
Cygwin, as opposed to Linux.  Most of my C/C++ experience has been on
Solaris.

I have a little test application and Makefile.  It builds a "shared object",
and then links an executable which references the shared object.  This
builds and runs on Linux and Cygwin.  The only difference between the two is
some minor conditional code in the Makefile which needs to know the file
extent of "shared objects" and "executables".  Otherwise, the "g++" lines
are identical.  I let "g++" worry about the details of building a shared
library.

All I produce on Cygwin is the dll and the exe.  I don't produce a ".def",
".exp", or ".lib", which I might create with "dlltool".  The executable
referencing my dll (seemingly) has no trouble loading the dll at runtime and
using the code in the dll.

So in what circumstances would I need to use "dlltool" to build these other
things?

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