Investigate raw-dylib support/workarounds for unicows

raw-dylib causes rust to generate import libraries which are, for dependencies, added to their rlib archives. This means they are always linked before unicows.lib, preventing unicows from replacing calls to W Unicode APIs to A APIs on 9x/ME.

I'm not sure there is a sensible way of using both at the moment 🤔

Just to note. Since #65 unicows is forcibly injected before all the rest on GNU targets to satisfy the order-dependent linker here.
Maybe make this behavior default and do the same on MSVC ones? That would also eliminate the need to specify standard imports manually.

@cher-nov

@cher-nov I'd rather not depend on unicows as a requirement in the first place -- that's currently needed because of the weird linker args needed for -gnu

@Jookia

In af0e5f9 I just added a hopefully definitive solution to this:

It'll link against unicows.lib by default now, in hopefully all required places. To not make it mandatory for NT-only projects, I also added -Zunicows=no as a compiler option to disable that. This should give us the best of both words.

@Jookia would you mind checking if this also works with the -gnu targets? I think the -lunicows can now be omitted!

The rust9x-sample config and the docs will then lose that huge block of configuration, and instead gain

rustflags = [
  # rust9x links against `unicows.lib` by default, make sure it's in your search path.
  '-Clink-arg=/home/seri/mnt/ext4/msvc-toolchains/platformsdk3790/Lib/unicows.lib',
  # If you don't want to use `unicows.lib` (you're not targeting Windows 9x/Me), you can disable it:
  # '-Zunicows=no',
]

I opened a PR to support this on the GNU toolchain. It works properly and the -Zunicows argument works too.

Thanks! Merged, squashed things to clean up a bit, updated docs and sample, and rust9x-1.98-beta-v3 includes this now!

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Investigate `raw-dylib` support/workarounds for `unicows` #15

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Investigate raw-dylib support/workarounds for unicows #15

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cher-nov commented on Jul 26, 2026

seritools commented on Jul 26, 2026

seritools commented on Aug 2, 2026

Jookia commented on Aug 3, 2026

seritools commented on Aug 3, 2026

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Investigate `raw-dylib` support/workarounds for `unicows` #15