I have a C++ program that I’m trying to link with a rather complicated DLL. When I link the DLL directly in visual studio, I get a number of errors telling me about symbols being “already defined”. These are not the “exported” DLL symbols, but rather some dependencies several layers deep.

However, I discovered that instead of linking this DLL when I compile/link the program, I can successfully load it dynamically using the Windows LoadLibrary() function and execute the exported functions without conflict.

My question is, is there a way to link this DLL at compile/link time and exclude the symbols that are conflicting (since my program doesn’t need to directly access them anyway), and only pull in the exported symbols?