Does anyone have experience of creating a DLM, DLL or SPAWN in the Interactive Data Language (IDL) from a *.c code? This is used to increase the speed of IDL’s computation for particularly slow routines. Well, it’s not just that, it’s doing it using IDL version 6.0, a vintage released 2003, which runs some legacy IDL code very well on a Windows 10 machine.

On the machine, I’ve installed the Visual Studio 2022, which has the MS cl.exe compiler. IDL indicates you can create a DLL using the Make_DLL routine. I’ve tried this and it does the compile and link, but there are a few errors, notably error LNK2019 and a fatal error LNK1120. I’m hoping it may just need a tweak to get it to work.

One solution would be to purchase an up-to-date version of IDL, but I was looking for a more economical route. Another solution would be to translate the existing IDL code into Python, then create DLL for routines for the slowly running Python routines, and call them in externally, however, that would take considerable time.

many thanks for any help, N