Building library without dependencies

I've got a huge application here called HugeApp, it needs different libraries (which I've coded) and some of these libraries might need dependencies (other libs coming from the internet or开发者_如何学C ad hoc lib developped here).

I was wondering, if it was feasible and/or a good idea to hide some of these dependencies from HugeApp.

Let's say that you make a library in charge of doing the encrypted communication on a system, does the top application care and/or needs to know that there is some encryption libraries that are needed for this part (comms) of the system? It might be implementation specific... or not...

Thank you

There's no need for it to know, if you build those libraries as external DLL's then the external libraries are the only thing that care about the dependency. If you add a reference to the pre-built DLL then HugeApp doesn't need to know about the dependencies of the library (as long as they are either present in the library or the appropriate DLL or lib file is present so that your dll can make use of it). If anything your library can be another project altogether and you can include a reference to that in which case the project of your HugeApp only cares about that main reference and the other project will handle everything else.

If you enable /OPT:REF in linker optimizations it you will list which (if any) libraries that have no functions or data used by the project during link time. You can then remove them from the dependency list and link line in project settings. This will reduce the chance of removing a static library that is a dependency of another static library if any are present/used in your VS solution.