I'm trying to compile and link my (very basic for now) emulator under MinGW : it compiles fine but at link time, but when I mention the ".lib" files from the DirectX 9 SDK to GCC, the DirectX functions are not found.
I've found somewhere "lib***.a" files that are supposed to be the DirectX 9 libs for use with MinGW, and GCC says the same thing with these.

Is there some obscure option which is needed for gcc to find the DirectX functions ? (maybe it fails because DirectX uses COM, I'm not sure)

Second question : what is the fastest C/C++ compiler for Windows ? Are there big speed differences between the compilers ?

Thanks
(sorry, this is not directly related to emulator programming. This should be is the newbie forum anyway. )