GNU ld.bfd supports linking directly against DLLs without using an
import library, and some projects have picked up on this habit.
(There's no one single unsurmountable issue with using import
libraries, but this is a regularly surfacing missing feature.)
As long as one is linking by name (instead of by ordinal), the DLL
export table contains most of the information needed. (One can
inspect what section a symbol points at, to see if it's a function
or data symbol. The practical implementation of this loops over all
sections for each symbol, but as long as they're not very many, that
should hopefully be tolerable performance wise.)
One exception where the information in the DLL isn't entirely enough
is on i386 with stdcall functions; depending on how they're done,
the exported function name can be a plain undecorated name, while
the import library would contain the full decorated symbol name. This
issue is addressed separately in a different patch.
This is implemented mimicing the structure of a regular import library,
with one InputFile corresponding to the static archive that just adds
lazy symbols, which then are fetched when they are needed. When such
a symbol is fetched, we synthesize a coff_import_header structure
in memory and create a regular ImportFile out of it.
The implementation could be even smaller by just creating ImportFiles
for every symbol available immediately, but that would have the
drawback of actually ending up importing all symbols unless running
with GC enabled (and mingw mode defaults to having it disabled for
historical reasons).
Can you say "MinGW only" in the comment?