[c] C error: undefined reference to function, but it IS defined

Just a simple program, but I keep getting this compiler error. I'm using MinGW for the compiler.

Here's the header file, point.h:

//type for a Cartesian point
typedef struct {
  double x;
  double y;
} Point;

Point create(double x, double y);
Point midpoint(Point p, Point q);

And here's point.c:

//This is the implementation of the point type
#include "point.h"

int main() {
  return 0;
}
Point create(double x, double y) {
  Point p;
  p.x = x;
  p.y = y;
  return p;
}

Point midpoint(Point p, Point q) {
  Point mid;
  mid.x = (p.x + q.x) / 2;
  mid.y = (p.y + q.y) / 2;
  return mid;
}

And here's where the compiler issue comes in. I keep getting:

testpoint.c: undefined reference to 'create(double x, double y)'

While it is defined in point.c.

This is a separate file called testpoint.c:

#include "point.h"
#include <assert.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
  double x = 1;
  double y = 1;
  Point p = create(x, y);

  assert(p.x == 1);
  return 0;
}

I'm at a loss as to what the issue could be.

I had this issue recently. In my case, I had my IDE set to choose which compiler (C or C++) to use on each file according to its extension, and I was trying to call a C function (i.e. from a .c file) from C++ code.

The .h file for the C function wasn't wrapped in this sort of guard:

#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#endif

// all of your legacy C code here

#ifdef __cplusplus
}
#endif

I could've added that, but I didn't want to modify it, so I just included it in my C++ file like so:

extern "C" {
#include "legacy_C_header.h"
}

(Hat tip to UncaAlby for his clear explanation of the effect of extern "C".)

I think the problem is that when you're trying to compile testpoint.c, it includes point.h but it doesn't know about point.c. Since point.c has the definition for create, not having point.c will cause the compilation to fail.

I'm not familiar with MinGW, but you need to tell the compiler to look for point.c. For example with gcc you might do this:

gcc point.c testpoint.c

As others have pointed out, you also need to remove one of your main functions, since you can only have one.

Add the "extern" keyword to the function definitions in point.h