Tor Lillqvist <tml@iki.fi>

Hans Breuer <hans@breuer.org>

Note that this document is not really maintained in a serious

fashion. Lots of information here might be misleading or outdated. You

have been warned.

The general parts, and the section about gcc and autoconfiscated

build, and about a Visual Studio build are by Tor Lillqvist.

General

=======

For prebuilt binaries (DLLs and EXEs) and developer packages (headers,

import libraries) of GLib, Pango, GTK+ etc for Windows, go to

http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html . They are for "native"

Windows meaning they use the Win32 API and Microsoft C runtime library

only. No POSIX (Unix) emulation layer like Cygwin in involved.

To build GLib on Win32, you can use either gcc ("mingw") or the

Microsoft compiler and tools. For the latter, MSVC6 and later have

been used successfully. Also the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler has

reportedly been used.

You can also cross-compile GLib for Windows from Linux using the

cross-compiling mingw packages for your distro.

Note that to just *use* GLib on Windows, there is no need to build it

yourself.

On Windows setting up a correct build environment can be quite a task,

especially if you are used to just type "./configure; make" on Linux,

and expect things to work as smoothly on Windows.

The following preprocessor macros are to be used for conditional

compilation related to Win32 in GLib-using code:

- G_OS_WIN32 is defined when compiling for native Win32, without

  any POSIX emulation, other than to the extent provided by the

  bundled Microsoft C library (msvcr*.dll).

- G_WITH_CYGWIN is defined if compiling for the Cygwin

  environment. Note that G_OS_WIN32 is *not* defined in that case, as

  Cygwin is supposed to behave like Unix. G_OS_UNIX *is* defined by a GLib

  for Cygwin.

- G_PLATFORM_WIN32 is defined when either G_OS_WIN32 or G_WITH_CYGWIN

  is defined.

These macros are defined in glibconfig.h, and are thus available in

all source files that include <glib.h>.

Additionally, there are the compiler-specific macros:

- __GNUC__ is defined when using gcc

- _MSC_VER is defined when using the Microsoft compiler

- __DMC__ is defined when using the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler

G_OS_WIN32 implies using the Microsoft C runtime, normally

msvcrt.dll. GLib is not known to work with the older crtdll.dll

runtime, or the static Microsoft C runtime libraries libc.lib and

libcmt.lib. It apparently does work with the debugging version of

msvcrt.dll, msvcrtd.dll. If compiled with Microsoft compilers newer

than MSVC6, it also works with their compiler-specific runtimes, like

msvcr70.dll or msvcr80.dll. Please note that it's non totally clear if

you would be allowed by the license to distrubute a GLib linked to

msvcr70.dll or msvcr80.dll, as those are not part of the operating

system, but of the MSVC product. msvcrt.dll is part of Windows.

For people using Visual Studio 2005 or later:

If you are building GLib-based libraries or applications, or GLib itself

and you see a C4819 error (or warning, before C4819 is treated as an error

in msvc_recommended_pragmas.h), please be advised that this error/warning should

not be disregarded, as this likely means portions of the build is not being

done correctly, as this is an issue of Visual Studio running on CJK (East Asian)

locales.  This is an issue that also affects builds of other projects, such as

QT, Firefox, LibreOffice/OpenOffice, Pango and GTK+, along with many other projects.

To overcome this problem, please set your system's locale setting for non-Unicode to

English (United States), reboot, and restart the build, and the code should build

normally.  See also this GNOME Wiki page [1] that gives a bit further info on this.

Building software that use GLib or GTK+

=======================================

Building software that just *uses* GLib or GTK+ also require to have

the right compiler set up the right way. If you intend to use gcc,

follow the relevant instructions below in that case, too.

Tor uses gcc with the -mms-bitfields flag which means that in order to

use the prebuilt DLLs (especially of GTK+), if you compile your code

with gcc, you *must* also use that flag. This flag means that the

struct layout rules are identical to those used by MSVC. This is

essential if the same DLLs are to be usable both from gcc- and

MSVC-compiled code. Such compatibility is desirable.

When using the prebuilt GLib DLLs that use msvcrt.dll from code that

uses other C runtimes like for example msvcr70.dll, one should note

that one cannot use such GLib API that take or returns file

descriptors. On Windows, a file descriptor (the small integer as

returned by open() and handled by related functions, and included in

the FILE struct) is an index into a table local to the C runtime

DLL. A file descriptor in one C runtime DLL does not have the same

meaning in another C runtime DLL.

Building GLib

=============

Again, first decide whether you really want to do this.

Before building GLib you must also have a GNU gettext-runtime

developer package. Get prebuilt binaries of gettext-runtime from

http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html .

Autoconfiscated build (with gcc)

================================

Tor uses gcc 3.4.5 and the rest of the mingw utilities, including MSYS

from www.mingw.org. Somewhat earlier or later versions of gcc

presumably also work fine.

Using Cygwin's gcc with the -mno-cygwin switch is not recommended. In

theory it should work, but Tor hasn't tested that lately. It can

easily lead to confusing situations where one mixes headers for Cygwin

from /usr/include with the headers for native software one really

should use. Ditto for libraries.

If you want to use mingw's gcc, install gcc, win32api, binutils and

MSYS from www.mingw.org.

Tor invokes configure using:

CC='gcc -mtune=pentium3 -mthreads' CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/gnu/include' \

	LDFLAGS='-L/opt/gnu/lib -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' CFLAGS=-O2 \

	./configure --disable-gtk-doc --prefix=$TARGET

The /opt/gnu mentioned contains the header files for GNU and (import)

libraries for GNU libintl. The build scripts used to produce the

prebuilt binaries are included in the "dev" packages.

Please note that the ./configure mechanism should not blindly be used

to build a GLib to be distributed to other developers because it

produces a compiler-dependent glibconfig.h. For instance, the typedef

for gint64 is long long with gcc, but __int64 with MSVC.

Except for this and a few other minor issues, there shouldn't be any

reason to distribute separate GLib headers and DLLs for gcc and MSVC6

users, as the compilers generate code that uses the same C runtime

library.

The DLL generated by either compiler is binary compatible with the

other one. Thus one either has to manually edit glibconfig.h

afterwards, or use the supplied glibconfig.h.win32 which has been

produced by running configure twice, once using gcc and once using

MSVC, and merging the resulting files with diff -D.

For MSVC7 and later (Visual C++ .NET 2003, Visual C++ 2005, Visual C++

2008 etc) it is preferred to use specific builds of GLib DLLs that use

the same C runtime as the code that uses GLib. Such DLLs should be

named differently than the ones that use msvcrt.dll.

For GLib, the DLL that uses msvcrt.dll is called libglib-2.0-0.dll,

and the import libraries libglib-2.0.dll.a and glib-2.0.lib. Note that

the "2.0" is part of the "basename" of the library, it is not

something that libtool has added. The -0 suffix is added by libtool

and is the value of "LT_CURRENT - LT_AGE". The 0 should *not* be

thought to be part of the version number of GLib. The LT_CURRENT -

LT_AGE value will on purpose be kept as zero as long as binary

compatibility is maintained. For the gory details, see configure.ac

and libtool documentation.

Building with Visual Studio

===========================

A more detailed outline of building GLib with its dependencies can

now be found on the GNOME wiki:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK%2B/Win32/MSVCCompilationOfGTKStack

Please do not build GLib in paths that contain spaces in them, as

this may cause problems during compilation and during usage of the

library.

In an unpacked tarball, you will find in build\win32\vs9 (VS 2008) and

build\win32\vs10 (VS 2010) a solution file that can be used to build

the GLib DLLs and some auxiliary programs under VS 2008 and VS 2010

(Express Edition will suffice with the needed dependencies) respectively.

Read the README.txt file in those folders for more

information. Note that you will need a libintl implementation, zlib, and 

libFFI.

If you are building from a GIT checkout, you will first need to use some

Unix-like environment or run win32/setup.py, 

which will expand the VS 2008/2010 project files, the DLL resouce files and

other miscellanious files required for the build.  Run win32/setup.py

as follows:

$python win32/setup.py --perl path_to_your_perl.exe

for more usage on this script, run

$python win32/setup.py -h/--help

[1]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK%2B/Win32/MSVCCompilationOfGTKStack under "Preparations"