Enable delayed loading of VTK libraries on Windows #5642
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Currently, VTK is a relatively large but mandatory dependency of PCL. However, it is mostly (if not only) needed for visualization/debugging/etc. such that a significant amount of library functionalities are actually independent of VTK. Still, VTK libraries will always be required since they are a link-time dependency even though they might be not used at all in many applications. For this reasoning, we propose to make the VTK libraries delay loaded on Windows using the
/DELAYLOAD
linker option. This allows to skip the VTK modules while distributing PCL, which makes the distribution process relatively lightweight (in particular, if the other dependencies are statically linked).The respective changes are rather small, after VTK was found only the respective linker flags are defined.