Can't import module: cmake building the wrong "type" of shared object?

[lhchang]

To preface this question, I'm still learning a lot about cmake/pybind and builds in general so I welcome any corrections to any assumptions or terminologies I may misuse.

I am trying to test whether pybind11 would work with this code that uses other third party libraries and with my cmake file I was successfully able to build a .so file in the style of <modulename>.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so. However, when I previously went through the tutorial I had noticed that when I built the example manually and used

$ c++ -O3 -Wall -shared -std=c++11 -fPIC $(python3 -m pybind11 --includes) module.cpp -o module$(python3-config --extension-suffix)

it produced a shared object with the same suffix and trying to run import module would raise a module not found error. It wasn't until I changed the above command from python3 to just python (this still being 3.8 in my virtual env) did it produce a <module>.so and this ended up working.

When I try to import the file cmake --build produced, I still get an error but the error this time is ```ImportError: dynamic module does not defined module export function (PyInit_). Is this an issue related to what I experienced before and if so is there a flag I can change in CMakeFiles.txt to fix it?

Thank you

[lhchang]

It turned out to be not related to the example that I had and was a simple mistake that was answered by the first FAQ