pntld line ~1257 scans the above string for export directives.
Looks like pntld looks at the segment characteristics rather than the name to determine whether it's a directive. I've added code to also check for the name. It seems that gcc produces directives that say -export:symbol, when symbol isn't present, but _symbol is. I added a check to look for that case, and now I'm data in my so files, but I can't know for sure what's actually in them because nm doesn't seem to want to read them (or the ones from the official pike package). When I get to the end of compilation, pike aborts because of a segmentation fault, trying to read address zero.
I'm not really sure how to debug that problem, but here is a copy of the dlopen debug output:
http://hww3.riverweb.com/mingw/startup.txt
Since the command line tools for vc++ are freely available, does it make more sense to use these tools instead of the mingw compiler chain? is that even feasible?
Bill