Rich Kilmer:
> Someone with more experience with compilers under Win32
> needs to weigh in here.  I think that Scintilla is compiled with
> MinGW (is that right?), but I can link to the DLL with MSVC, VB,
> etc.

   Scintilla compiles with MinGW, MSVC or Borland and any of these will
interoperate with programs compiled with any of the compilers. The standard
distribution uses MinGW. Supporting multiple compilers requires quite a bit
of effort but has the advantage of ensuring higher quality code as portable
code is less likely to be relying upon bugs that are hidden by one
implementation. To maximise interoperability, Scintilla exposes a very
primitive calling technique which is all handled at run time through one
entry point rather than using a linker. Scintilla receives all requests and
sends all notifications through Windows 'messages' which was the mechanism
defined in the original release of Windows for use by visual components. It
is not a reasonable technique for language extensions as it is ugly and
requires each call to pass through the operating system which has
significant overhead.

   You don't normally link to Scintilla. You load the DLL, the DLL's
initialisation defines a window class, you create a window of that class and
then you use SendMessage to call the window.

   Neil