README.win32
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 Lots of information here might be misleading or outdated.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"