So I am creating a C++ program using the allegro version 4.4.2 library and I need to be able to produce an executable package which I can submit to a course instructor and have run on his computer without issues. I am developing the program using DevC++. If I am understanding this correctly so far, I need to link to a static library for allegro and then the executable should include the library info and thus the library itself is not necessary to have included in the executable package. I have also seen some recommendations regarding third party tools that produce executable packages, but these seem to be more general (not necessarily allegro compatible?) and I am hoping to avoid downloading more third party software.
I have tried linking to the static library liballegro-4.4.2-monolith-static-mt.a but for some reason when I do this I get a whole slew of undefined reference compile time errors. I have read that it is necessary to have #define ALLEGRO_STATICLINK included in the project, I have this statement at the top of my main source file but I am not sure if I am meant to define this somewhere in the project options instead?
Any guidance or link to resources which will help me solve my problem would be extremely appreciated! I am just getting into the meat of programming with C++ beginning to learn object oriented programming methods, I still occasionally struggle with the basics so thank you in advance for your help!
Backstory (if interested/relevant?): I am taking a Game AI programming course for which we need to create some example programs to demonstrate AI algorithms. The course specifies Java but I am most familiar with C++ and the course instructor says this is fine but I must be able to submit an executable to him which he can just run on his computer without issues. To best achieve what the course asks I feel the allegro library (which I already have installed) will be of great help, mostly for drawing graphics to the screen and such.
So I just ended up using a dynamically linked version of my program and including the appropriate .dll files which turned out to be a lot less work than I thought it would be.
Basically I just had to ensure the allegro-4.4.2-md.dll from the bin folder was included in the folder with the executable. I then sent off the package (the .exe compiled file and the needed supporting files such as bitmaps sound files etc) to a few friends and had them try to run it. They then gave me the warnings from their computers along the lines of "Test.exe cannot be run ****.dll cannot be found".
I searched the exact names of the dll files they were receiving warnings for in the folder with my game and voila it now seems to execute on whatever PC it is sent to.
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I'm lost here and I have no clue how to proceed. This is not a question about how to make my program work, this is a question about how to stop wasting my time.
My programming environment is Visual Studio 2013 on windows, in C++.
I use 3 libraries extensively, namely: boost (using dynamic linking), OpenCV, and Qt.
During the development, I have configured VS to look at those 3 libraries by default for include and .lib. I have also added the 3 folders containing all the dlls to my PATH environment variable.
It works, but it is sometime painful, let me explain you when.
First hassle: Anytime I have a LNK error telling me I miss a function, it is usually on OpenCV since it has only one include file referencing all the functions. I have to look at OpenCV's source code to see what module this function belongs to and to know what I must link my program to.
Second Hassle: When comes the time to deploy my application, I have to ship it with all the relevant dlls. To know which one I need, I open dependency walker and try to forget nothing, I have then to test it on a different computer because 102% of the time I have missed a couple, and then I have to configure my Installer generator to include all those one by one.
Third Hassle: To ease a little bit the process of configuring a new development machine, I have recently switched to NuGet. It is great, I add boost with a couple of clicks to any project. But now my boost DLLs are everywhere, I have one folder per boost library, and since there are dozens of those I can't even add them all at once to my PATH now, so I have to move them manually to the appropriate folder, and that is really not what I want to do with my not-so-precious-but-who-are-you-to-judge time
I have looked around and couldn't find any good practice regarding this issue, maybe because they are too obvious, or too specific to a particular setup.
How do you do? How would you do if you were me?
We put all our external dependencies in version control along with the code. This ensures that all code can build "out of the box" on any of our development machines and also ensures that for any given version of the code, we know exactly which dependencies is has.
The best way to check for missing dependencies is how have a good automated test suite, if you've got comprehensive converge then if your tests pass you must have deployed the required libraries.
In terms of linking to the appropriate libraries, unfortunately, that just sounds like an issue with the structure of OpenCV (I'm not familiar with OpenCV). I tend to use dumpbin under Windows and nm under Linux to easily grep for symbols when I get link errors with an unfamiliar library.
Heads up, this is going to be confusing:
I customized 9 files from Qt5.2: qquicktextdocument.cpp qquicktextdocument.h qquicktextedit.cpp qquicktextedit_p.h qquicktextedit_p_p.h qquicktextnode.cpp qquicktextnodeengine.cpp qquicktextnodeengine_p.h qquicktextnode_p.h
Each file is simply prefixed with a letter and still inside /qtdeclarative/src/quick/items/. I am 100% happy with the modifications I made being put under GPL etc. I somewhat want my end application (discussed below) to be Apache or MIT, but, I'm flexible.
My modifications work fine. When I modify a few additional files I am able to compile them along with the rest of Qt (at the same time, using the same make command). But these modifications are going into another Qt application that I am making which I want other people to be able to use, and requiring general consumers to have a custom compiled version of Qt would be obviously absurd.
I want to package/compile/do something, that will enable me to include the modifications in my final project as a shared library, or something.
As a web developer writing C++ and Qt, I am very confused about linking shared libraries, header files, etc.
To recap, I modified Qt 5.2 and made a custom compilation of it for an application I am building, and I want people to be able to run that application without having to have a custom compilation of Qt. I need a way to decouple my Qt modifications from Qt.
I realize this might be a big topic, I'm not expecting a step by step guide, just some general guidance. So far I have tried compiling my modified files as a library, then including that library in my actual project, but I am getting undefined references and missing files all over the place. (I don't know if I did anything right)
I am also currently looking at subclassing the classes I want but I'm unsure about this. It might require copy pasting some code, which could have licensing issues?
end goal: be able to have a wavy underline (in qml) for incorrectly spelt words.
Thank You.
My 5 cents.
If your changes can be useful (in general) to other people you can try to push them to upstream via codereview.
If you want your application to run only in windows everything become obvious: in windows it is normal to provide your application with shared libraries (to avoid DLL HELL). Btw, have you heard about static linking?
Qt has some plugin mechanism. You can compile your code into shared object (dynamic library) and install it with your application. For example, QML FolderListModel do this. You can look at code in $qt5_src/qtdeclarative/src/imports/folderlistmodel.
The situation is the following: I have the source code of one programm (lets call it programA) (written in C and C++), as well as the CMakeLists.txt and CTestConfig.cmake files. I already installed programA using CMake's graphical user interface and, as it is obvious, it worked. It created the .exe file (I'm working on Windows 7 OS).
The problem is that, right now, I've been asked to edit the program (and so, I must be able to edit the code and degugging it as changes are made). I also need to compile it but not in .exe anymore but in .dll so I can add it to a website we have.
I've read in forums that CMake can compile programA into a .dll if I need to, but as I would need to make some changes I consider that CMake debugging is not as useful and easy as using entirely VS. From the little I know from CMake language, the CMakeLists.txt is mainly used to check the OS of the user as well as adding some libraries in case they are not found.
I have to admit I have no idea in programming CMake directives, as I have been working with ASP.NET, C, C++ and C# mostly. Then, my idea is to try to work only in visual studio 2010 instead of using cmake as well, so once I have the program 'adapted' to VS and can be compiled just using VS, I'm ready to start my job. So the question I have is how can I perform the same task CMake did just using Visual Studio (Is there any way of implementing CMake directives in VS?), can VS compile by receiving as an argument something similar to that CMake.txt file (though it needs to be translated into another language)?
To skip the use of CMake I tried to copy the source code into a new project in VS. However as it does not use the CMake directives when compiling, it gives several errors, most of them related to the fact that some headers.h can't be found (cause they might be in a subfolder). And there are so many subfolders to add the paths to the predefined directories of search that it would take ages.
I'm sorry I can't be more precise in my explanation. I'm good at programming little projects on my own, but it's the first time I have to work on other's programm. Please don't hesitate to ask if anything was not properly understood
I would appreciate a lot any suggestion / advice /guidance you can give.
To make a dll, use add_library command and the SHARED keyword
add_library(mylib SHARED ${files})
this is easy with CMake, don't go back in visual that will be harder at the end
The Good News
Fortunately, cmake can generate VS Projects automaticaly for you (this tutorial s specific for OpenTissue, but Steps 1 to 3 should be the same for you).
The [not so] Bad News
Depending on the complexity of the project, VS Projects automaticaly generated by cmake can get pretty nasty, to the point of illegibility. It will, for example, hard link any library dependencies using the specific paths of your machine, so the project will most certainly not be portable across setups. In any case, that's the intended bahavior, because the primary idea of supporting this generator is simply making it work, thus allowing users to easily compile projects using MSVC, so there's not much you can do here. Nonetheless, it should work in your machine and will certainly be a great starting point for you, just create a project yourself from scratch copying the relevant parts out of the automatic generated version.
I've recently started using PDCurses in a C++ game I'm working on. When I compile the program on my own machine (windows) and run the .exe, everything works as it should.
When I take that .exe onto a different computer that doesn't have PDCurses and I try to run it, I get an error about a missing pdcurses.dll file.
After doing a bit of research online, I found out that including the .dll file along with the .exe should make it run but it didn't work for me.
This is how I compiled the program using MinGW: g++ game.cpp -o game -lpdcurses
So my question is, how do I make this program run on computers that don't have PDCurses setup, and also, is there a way to do this by combining the .exe with whatever additional file(s) the system needs to run the program? I've also read that you can do some sort of static linking but so far I've been unable to find a way to do this.
Thanks in advance for the help.
NOTE: In case it matters, I setup PDCurses following this tutorial: http://comptb.cects.com/1848-adding-pdcurses-to-mingw
Not sure if that was the best way to do it but I'm able to compile and run C++ code that uses pdcurses on my computer fine.
Sorry for not posting the exact messages. Here they are:
The first one I got when I didn't include the pdcurses.dll file along with the executable said :
The program can't start because pdcurses.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.
The second one I got after I included the pdcurses.dll:
*The program can't start because libcc_s_dw2-1.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.*
You need to include all the dynamic libraries you linked with. Be careful of licensing, although IIRC there's not much that will bite you with MinGW.
There should be a 'ldd' command if you have the MinGW shell. Try running it on game.exe and it will tell you what libraries you need to run your program. You need to include them all with the exe.
If you want to try and remove the dependency nightmare you can use the static linking (-static) option to your gcc link command. You may not be able to actually do that if you don't have the static versions of your libraries installed. This has other implications - your exe will be bigger and the OS's shared shared page code will not work because it can't tell what parts (DLL code) you are sharing with other apps. In effect, your application will use more memory as a result, although it may be insignificant.
Another option is to get the sources to PDCurses and compile it as a static library. That way you don't have to get involved in the DLL Hell.
Compile it as a C library instead of a C++ library and you should be good to go.
I have written and tested a library in C++. The code even works in my Android application if I add the source files directly. While I do have experience compiling static and dynamic libraries for common operating systems, I have zero experience compiling for a mobile system like this. I've done some research, and I'm still a bit lost as to exactly how to approach this. For example, I am unsure of whether to build a makefile for use with ndk-build or to just invoke one of the Android's compilers directly.
I did see this question, but it does not quite match my situation. I just want to run build and have it spit out libfoo.a (I'd like to produce libfoo.so as well, but libfoo.a is of greater interest to me right now.) The example in that question's winning answer implied that it would build the library as one step/module for building the final application. I tried doing it that way just to see, but I had no luck.
Can anyone please guide me in this endeavor?
CLARIFICATION -- I do not want to build the library and immediately pipe it into an application. I want a .a or .so file that I can link against in multiple future Android applications.
Create a dummy java file with empty code and make sure there is a android_main function in your C++ code. Build using ndk-build. the resulting apk will make your library an application.
See the samples from the android-ndk-r5/samples directory, see the sample native-bitmap to get some idea.
If I understand it correctly that a shared library is not acceptable and you want to be static (but why is that so important?), probably the easiest way to do so is to simply supply source code that can be added to a project.
Ultimately there is nothing special about the ndk build system other than it knowing the right commands to issue to build the necessary files for the assortment of curent android architectures. If you really want to do something different, you can log the operation of the android build system in creating a shared library, and then write your own Makefile that performs the analogous steps to create a static library. HOWEVER, you will have to update your Makefile any time the underlying assumptions or target collections change in a new android version.