Qt in Windows: Dinamic building, DLLs and size

**Momergil** · 5th December 2011, 22:21

Hello!

I'm developing some softwares [in Windows] that by now needs to be started through the Qt IDE in order to work. When I want them, though, to be executed apart from Qt (asa normal software, i.e. as if I had bought them and installed on my PC), I noticed that allways I must take along with the .exe file (thoose .dll that are needed for the software to be executed). That wouldn't be that problem if it wasn't the case that:

- The 5 DLLs required for the .exe to work take the size together of 179 Mb.
- It's quite not good to have the DLL directly in the same folder of the .exe.

The first point is truly bad because imagine that I want to create lots of softwares and each of them, of course, will have each one its own folder in the "Programs and Files". Well, that would be terrible because that would take lot of space in my driver and all because of repeated dlls! One of my software here "at my side" has a .exe of 2 Mb and + 179 Mb of dlls. That means that if I had 6 softwares like this, I would have already used 1Gb of space in my driver for softwares that actually take 2 Mb of space!

The second problem is like more "aestetic": I think it would be better if at least I could put the DLLs inside a specific folder apart from the .exe file.

So my question is: isn't there a better way for dealing with this (and still using the dynamic buildig)? Could I put the DLLs in a different folder that in the place wwhere the .exe is? If I had the case of using various Qt-based softwares which require the same DLL but needed to be put in different folders as it is normally done, couldn't I create a "mother main folder" in which all the softwares, in theyr specific folders, would be placed and also another folder specific for the DLLs which would than be shared by all the softwares?

Thanks!

Momergil

**Lesiok** · 6th December 2011, 10:19

179 MB - this is a size of debug DLL's.
Of course You can put DLL's in another directory, but this directory must be in PATH or DLL's must be registered in system. This applies to any DLL, not just Qt.