I haven't programmed for a while and am trying to set up my build environment on a new laptop. I've just forgotten how and think that I did allot of things wrong last time!
What I'm trying to do is have that common Include Directory and common Lib directory so when I build projects or other dependencies, etc... my compiler is able to find all the include and lib files it needs. I'm not formally trained so some obvious things to you guys are learning points for me.
I'm going to use a Mingw compiler and MSYS. Off memory I put the Include directory and the lib directory in the Mingw directory but I could be wrong there.
I'm just trying to set up an effective and simple build environment on Windows 7.
Where should all my directories go? Thanks
If you aren't already, MSYS2 is generally preferred over MSYS. I'm going to answer this assuming MSYS2. I use the 64 bit version, so that is what I'll show, but it should be simple enough to change.
I will also assume you put the msys64 directory in the base directory, if not replace C:/msys64/ with C:/wherever/you/put/it/msys64/.
When using the msys shell, /c/msys64/usr/ is the same as C:/msys64/usr/ which is the same as /usr/ since it tries to blend Linux file organization with windows, and it can sometimes be slightly unintuitive. When you install msys libraries, usually the include files are in C:/msys64/usr/include/ and the libraries are in C:/msys64/usr/lib/. The exception to this is when you have a 64-bit version and a 32-bit version of a program, in which case the headers are in C:/msys64/mingw64/include/ and the libs in C:/msys64/mingw64/lib/ for 64-bit (mingw32 for 32 bit).
In order to build using these, you will need to add the appropriate include paths and library paths. So, to make all 64-bit programs available, you would add the following flags
-IC:/msys64/usr/include -IC:/msys64/mingw64/include -LC:/msys64/usr/lib -LC:/msys64/mingw64/lib
When you compile your own programs from source, you put them wherever you'd like. It is best not to put them in the same directory as the package manager to avoid collisions. Running make install sometimes won't run as seamlessly on msys as it would on linux. In these cases, creating a folder such as C:/msys64/custom/include/ is a safer alternative. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/30/where-should-i-put-software-i-compile-myself for some more insight on this.
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I'm now using TDM-GCC 64 bit compiler and have originally built all my libraries (dependencies for other libraries) and projects using this compiler to create 64 bit binaries (which is what I want).
Recently I have run into some build issues where I was building a Fast Light Tool Kit (gui toolkit) project which included math.h. This is where I ran into my first build issue and made me realize that I've probably set up my build environment incorrectly. Everything was built using MSYS.
My root directory is C:\mingw so when I configured each project I used the commands:
./configure --prefix=c:\mingw and the appropriate c:\mingw include and lib directories were created (c:\mingw\include & c:\mingw\lib).
FLTK contains a math.h file which directs the compiler to search for the appropriate math.h c++ file in the relevant include directory but the issue is it is telling me it can't find it (math.h: no such file or director etc). I'm using Windows 7 64 bit.
I think this is because the way I have set up my build environment, I have maybe not accounted for the fact that TDM-GCC can compile both 32 and 64 bit binaries so this somehow has affected the compilers interpretation of where my c++ math.h file is.
I looked on this explanation of how to go about building libraries using Mingw64 on this link: enter link description here but I think TDM-GCC has taken care of a few of the problems this article is designed to resolve.
How do I set up my build environment correctly for the TDM-GCC 64 bit compiler so all my directories are found?
I noticed there are a number of include directories:
C:\mingw\x86_64-w64-mingw32\include
C:\mingw\lib\gcc\x86_64-w64-mingw32\5.1.0\include
PLUS my own directory created when I build my projects
C:\mingw\include
What am I doing wrong here? Should I have used one of the first two directories as my include directory? I think this where I have baused things up.
I'm trying to create an Open Source C++ project. I want it to be as easy to build as possible, but at the same time cross platform.
I don't need gui or heavy libraries like boost or Qt, so I've settled on using GitHub, CMake, and LibSourcey.
My problem is, I can't find a way to make my project easy to build in windows, which is my development environment.
How can I "make install" a library in Windows for use in my project? Do I even have to install it in windows?
Is it possible to download, build, and link it automatically?
On windows, besides an installer, I also want to make a portable version, so don't want any hard coded library paths.
I assume, on some platforms, like Linux, libraries are built separably and packaged up by maintainers. So I shouldn't just bundle up my own copies.
So, my question is:
How can I set up a project that is cross platform and easy to build, and what are the best practices?
You can create git submodule in your git repo with path for example
contrib/LibSourcery and url to github repo of LibSourcery, because of LibSourcery uses cmake you just
need add such line into your CMakeLists.txt: add_subdirectory(contrib/LibSourcery)
So person who want to use your code, just do git clone --recursive url
to get all of your code and dependencies, after that it run cmake -G, to create project for IDE of his choice (including MSVC++ of course),
open project in IDE and press build button, that's all.
Use babun. It's a wrapper for cygwin and it works perfectly for everything I need, even compiling with cmake.
Alternatively, you could use premake, which uses lua as a config system and works fine on windows.
There is no elegant cross-platform way, since the idea of "make install" doesn't exist on Windows, therefore the use of cmake install is undefined there. For something which is supposed to help cross-platform, I feel this is a deficiency w cmake.
My solution is to write a custom _INSTALL which takes the same args as cmake install and then on Linux it just calls install, and on Windows it does an add_command which does a post-build copy to the install paths, which accomplishes the same thing. Basically, _INSTALL behaves the way you expect a cross-platform install command to behave. Can share my _INSTALL func if there is interest.
_INSTALL is placed nto a Helper.cmake, and included in all my CMakeList.txt for my projects, so all I need to do is call it and the generated lib/inc files magically appear for both win and linux.
You can use vcpkg, an open source package manager for c and c++. It allows to easily download and compile libraries and then use find_package from within CMake like you would on linux. It's very easy to use. It even provides hints as to how to alter your cmake file to use the libraries.
I started by installing packages with the command line, and then wondered why they wouldn't show up in visual studio. But I realized that it would download 32 bit libraries by default. Use .\vcpkg install <libname>:x64-windows if you need the 64 bit libraries.
After running the integrate command, you will need to delete any cmake caches to have MSVS use the new toolchain.
I'm developing an application using Qt and OpenGL, and found it necessary to download the GLM library. It's a header-only library, so I don't need to link to anything. I want this application to build on any system that has the correct libraries installed. My problem is that I don't know where to put GLM so that the system can find it without adding a specific path to the project's .pro file. The .pro file is part of my git repository, which is how the source is distributed to other systems like Linux, etc. So I don't want this file to specify the exact location of GLM because other systems could have it in other places.
I'm currently developing on Windows, compiling in Qt Creator using Visual C++ 2010. I read from MSDN that #include <file> searches using the INCLUDE environment variable, so I tried to add the path to glm.hpp to INCLUDE, but QtCreator's build environment for this project seems to overwrite INCLUDE. So I appended the path to GLM to the new INCLUDE from within QtCreator's Projects tab, but my code still can't find glm.hpp.
In general, how can I add an external library to my system such that my compiler will be able to find it without specifying the exact location in a project file that's distributed to other systems?
What you need is a build system with the power to search the system for the libraries you request, and be able to do so on any platform. One such build system is cmake, and it is the most widely used build system. In essence, cmake allows you to write a build script in which you can specify all the things you normally specify when creating a project in Qt Creator or Visual Studio, like the list of source files, grouped by targets to compile (libraries, executables, etc.), the relative paths to the headers, and libraries to include for linking and for include-paths, amongst many more things. For libraries that are installed on the system, there is a function, called find_package() (part of cmake script commands), that will find out if the library is installed and where to find its lib files and headers (storing those paths as cache strings that you can specify on the targets and such). It usually works great, as long as the libraries are not installed in weird places. The way it works is that when you run cmake, it will generate a build script/configuration for almost any platform you specify, and then you use that to compile your code. It can generate makefiles (Unix-like or windows), CodeBlocks project files, Visual Studio project files, etc.. And many IDEs also have native support for cmake projects.
I wish I could recommend an alternative, just to sound less biased for cmake, but I haven't heard of any that truly compare to it, especially for the purpose of locating external dependencies and working with different platforms. I would guess Boost.Build is decent too.
How can I use libcurl with my project without actually installing it or curl on the system?
I want to make my source-code portable, so that any developer can copy the folder with all sources and other files, run make and compile the program without the need for system level installations.
I am looking for (probably separate) solutions for Linux and for Windows (dll?). If it is possible, provide some standard/official solution and not hack (I'd like to be educated about linking third party libraries)
I've used it on Windows using Visual Studio, all you need to do under Windows:
Download the source
Using CMake generate the project files (when using Visual Studio).
Build the libraries, 3 files will be built: libcurl.lib, libcurl_imp.lib and libcurl.dll
Include curl.h in your project and add the paths to your .lib files
Build your program, put libcurl.dll in the executable folder and it will work.
On Linux it should be a similar process, build the libraries and include them with your source.
You probably want to build a static library out of libcurl and link agains it. Should be pretty straightforward and the process is almost identical on every OS.
I'm wondering how to "package" a C++ project for release. It uses various libraries, and I don't want a user to have to go through the same setup I did, with putting the right files in the right place and such. I had difficulty researching this, because I'm not sure the technical term for this issue. If I'm using command line compiling on Linux, is there an easy way to do this?
Your approach to this will differ on Windows and Linux because each OS handles this a different way. I'm more familiar with Linux so I'll restrict my answer to just the Linux side of things.
When you link your executable with a library using -l flag the linker defaults to looking in the normal system library directories so there are four approaches here.
Require the user to properly install the libraries themselves. However, it sounds like you don't want to do that.
Have the user add the library location to LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable.
Your third option is force the linker to look in a certain path for the libraries using the -rpath flag. For example, to have the application look in its working directory for a shared library you can compile with: g++ -rpath ./ -l SomeLib -o MyApp myapp.cpp
One other option is to static link your code with their library that way you only have to distribute one executable. If a static library exists you can use g++ -static -l SomeLib -o MyApp myapp.cpp to tell gcc to link statically.
On windows I would recommand wix http://wix.sourceforge.net/ to create the .msi installer
I would like to point out, the lookup path for .dlls I recommand putting all .dll in the same folder as your .exe since this has the highest priority
However, the vc crt (the c/c++ runtime library) should be installed using the redistributional package from microsoft -> updates automatically http://www.microsoft.com/de-de/download/details.aspx?id=5555
Wix can include the redistributional package into the same .msi therefore you have only to deploy a single installer file.
You mean an installer?
On Windows the program that you run to install a new app which outs everything in the correct directory, creates the start menu and lets you un-install it?
There is an installer builder in Visual Studio (might not be in the free express version) which makes .msi installer files. It's fairly easy to use for simple tasks but becomes complicated to do anything more.
Alternatively, to create traditional setup.exe type installs I use the excellent free Innosetup
On linux you would generally create a package using whatever format your distribution uses (.deb / .rpm ). There are lots of instructions on the specifics of each one and the tools to do so will probably already be installed in your Linux system