libgen4dll
A simple tool for generating .lib file from .dll
Notes
You need to either include the VC binaries in your path or use the VS command prompt to use.
Usage:
libgen4dll <dll-files>
If you have VC binaries in your path, you can simply drag and drop.
Reasoning
I have failed many times to compile the tensorflow C++ bindings from source using bazel. The inconsistency is overwhelming, and bazel builds require specific version of python and bazel, and configuring an environment just for that seemed overwhelming.
I found out that the C binding binaries here was in fact a C++ binding with VC name mangling conventions. But the download did not include a .lib file, and thus requires the caller to call LoadLibrary() and GetProcAddress() for every called function. The C++ functions requires using mangled names and calling member functions with __thiscall convention seemed really difficult.
Thus creating a lib file for the dll seemed the right approach. As suggested here, I made a simple tool that will automate this process, since accoring to the tensorflow page, the C and C++ API is subject to change in future versions, thus requires a automated approach to do this.
License
This tool is free to use and modify as long as the derived forms are still open-source.(GPL-v3)