General ======= For more information about the port or GLib, GTk+ and the GIMP to native Windows, and pre-built binaries (DLLs), surf to http://www.gimp.org/win32/ . "Native" means that we use the Win32 API only, and no POSIX (Unix) emulation layer except that provided by the Microsoft runtime C library. To build GLib on Win32, you can use either gcc or the Microsoft compiler and tools. Both the compiler from MSVC 5.0 and from MSVC 6.0 have been used successfully. But note that to just *use* GLib on Windows, there is no need to build it, prebuilt DLLs are available from the webiste above. The following preprocessor macros are used for conditional compilation related to Win32: - G_OS_WIN32 is defined when compiling for Win32, *and* without any POSIX emulation, other that to the extent provided by the bundled Microsoft C library (msvcrt.dll) and the pthreads-win32 library. For instance, pathnames are in the native Windows syntax. - 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 when compiling for Cygwin. - G_PLATFORM_WIN32 is defined when either G_OS_WIN32 or G_WITH_CYGWIN is defined. The Win32 port of GLib and related software uses only G_OS_WIN32. As G_OS_WIN32 is defined in glibconfig.h, it is available to all source files that use GLib (or GTk+, which uses GLib). Additionally, there are the compiler-specific macros: - __GNUC__ is defined when using GCC - _MSC_VER is defined when using the Microsoft compiler G_OS_WIN32 implies using the Microsoft C runtime MSVCRT.DLL. GLib is not known to work with the older CRTDLL.DLL runtime, or the static Microsoft C runtime libraries. Building software that use GLib or GTk+ ======================================= Even building software that just *use* GLib or GTk+ also require to have the right compiler set up the right way, so if you intend to use gcc, follow the relevant instructions below in that case, too. Libiconv ======== Before building GLib you must also have the libiconv library, either from the same website mentioned above, or from it's homepage at http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html. Libiconv has makefiles for building with MS Visual C only, but as it is one source file only, building it "by hand" with gcc isn't hard. Where are the makefiles? ======================== If you are building from a CVS snapshot, you will not have any makefile.mingw or makefile.msc file. You should copy the corresponding makefile.mingw.in or makefile.msc.in file to that name, and edit the @GLIB_VERSION@ strings to the correct version number. This is done automatically when an official GLib source distribution package is built. Building GLib with gcc ====================== I use the latest gcc, gcc-2.95.3. Version 2.95.2 will most probably also work. You can either use gcc running on Cygwin, or the "pure" mingw gcc. Using the latter is much easier. Just fetch the latest version of gcc for mingw and the msvcrt runtime, from www.mingw.org. Set up your PATH so that the gcc from the bin directory that got created above is the one that gets used. Even if you run the mingw gcc, you still want to have Cygwin to run make in. Then run make -f makefile.mingw. I use the -fnative-struct flag, which means that in order to use the prebuilt DLLs (especially of GTK+), you *must* also use that flag. (This flag means that the struct layout is identical to that used by MSVC. This is essential if the same DLLs are to be usable both from gcc- and MSVC-compiled code, which definitely is a good thing.) It is also possible to use the auto*, ./configure and libtool mechanism when building for mingw. You should be running Cygwin, or maybe cross-compiling from real Unix, for the configure script to work, obviously. The same libtool issue has to be taken into account as when building for Cygwin: You most probably should have a very new libtool. Remember to invoke configure with CC='gcc -fnative-struct' if you want to produce DLLs binary compatible with the "official" ones. But please note that the ./configure mechanism should not blindly be used to build a GLib to be distributed to potential developers because it produces a compiler-dependent glibconfig.h (and config.h, but that shouldn't matter). For instance, the typedef for gint64 is long long with gcc, but __int64 with MSVC. Otherwise, there really shouldn't be any reason to distribute separate GLib DLLs for gcc and MSVC users, as both compiler+tools generate code that uses the same C runtime library. Thus one either has to edit glibconfig.h afterwards, or use the hand-written config.h.win32 and glibconfig.h.win32. There are probably also other hickups when using auto* and configure to build for mingw, sigh. Every now and then I try to get rid of the hand-written makefiles and configuration headers for Win32, and start fooling around with auto* etc, but after a while give up and fall back. At least, it used to be like that. Lately I have again been working on using auto*/configure/libtool on Win32, and it now seems to work well enough (with some patches applied to the current CVS libtool...). The hand-written makefile.mingw(.in) files, and the stuff in the "build" module has been updated to produce DLLs and import libraries that match what Makefile.am and libtool produces. If you want to run the Cygwin-based gcc, it gets a bit more complicated. We still want gcc to produce code that does not use Cygwin, but the msvcrt runtime. In theory it should work to use the -no-cygwin flag, but I haven't tested that lately. If you would want to use the Cygwin tools to generate a GLib that *does* use the Cygwin runtime, the normal Unix configuration method should work as if on Unix. Note that successfully producing shared libraries (DLLs) most probably requires you to have a very new libtool. (And a new libtool probably requires rather new autoconf and automake.) Building with MSVC ================== If using the Microsoft toolchain, build with `nmake -f makefile.msc`. --Tor Lillqvist