how to use cpp source for 2 projects

I'm not sure if I am going about this the right way. I am making some c++ classes to use in 2 apps. I am going to have to compile them to be used in a Cocoa app and 开发者_开发知识库later be compiled for use with fastcgi.

Should I create a dynamic library?

If the source files have to be compiled with different conditional compilation settings to work in the two applications, you'd better ship the source and compile it along with the apps themselves.

Otherwise, you can create a library and ship the compiled versions along with the headers for compilation of the apps. Whether the library should be dynamic or not depends on your situation. If you don't need to update the library separately without recompiling the executable, a simple static library is probably a better choice.

Don't forget that you have static library as an option too. On some platforms dynamic libs come with a bunch of annoying baggage. They're also slightly slower (though this is usually beside the point). They also can't be replaced without recompiling the program (you might be more concerned about this in a web environment). Finally, when you're only running one of the programs on a computer you gain nothing by making the lib dynamic...and little when there's only two.

If you want to share multiple C++ class among projects you should typically place them in a class library. Not familiar with Cocoa though.

If you have many classes, then shared library. Make sure to use only abstract classes and no code in public headers (templates are OK). Provide factories (or plain functions) to instantiate the objects.

If that sounds like too much coding for you then, well, modern version control makes it rather painless to simply re-use the files in several projects, living in the same repository.

P.S. Another factor to consider is how many people work on the project. Shared library is an extra responsibility. If you have a person to take care of it, then it might be worth doing simply from organizational point of view.