I'm writing a C++ static library using Visual Studio 2008. My static library needs to be loaded by different executables for Windows and Linux (Red Hat)
Now, for the windows build I've got no problems since I'm developing using its environment (as I've already said VS 2008 on Win 8).
My problems occurs when I move the code on Linux.
Sincerely I don't know what is the better solution.
So I'm here asking a few questions looking for the right choice:
Should I compile my executable on Windows using some tools to make a build for linux? Is this even possible? What tool? I tried Cmake but I hadn't found a way.
Should I compile my lib on windows, transfer it on my Linux system and compile in Linux an executable that loads my static library?
Is there a tool that merely converts my vcproj into a makefile? So in windows I only generate the makefile, send it to the Linux System and there compile everything?
The real problem is that I'm not that confident with makefiles, the project is really huge and create my own makefile from scratch is my last possible option and I'd like to avoid it since there's a lot of work to do and it could be time consumming
Thank in advance!
At the end of my journey searching for the right choice I've found the solution that best suits my needs.
What I've done was using Make It So that created makefiles for each project inside my solution, then transferred makefile together with source code, after a little customisation of the makefiles to suit my needs I compiled smoothly my code.
Thanks to those who commented, you helped me in my researches!
Cheers!
Related
I am attempting to convert the ndn library project found at "https://github.com/named-data/ndn-cpp" into something that can be imported into several existing mfc/wpf/forms Visual Studio Projects (building it as .lib or .dll would work).
As a note, it appears to have previously been converted into c# for windows for a older build of ndn, but is no long supported and will not connect with the current ndn network.(https://github.com/named-data/ndn-dot-net)
I have looked into the using the WSL features that they have added to windows 10, and the Visual studio Linux Cross Platform projects, but these all seem to only be able to make .exes that will run in windows not a .lib or .dll that can be imported into another project.
I have also look into the shared items project but what I was able to find didn't seem like it would work for what I'm trying to do.
Lastly, I tried using cygwin. I was able to compile and generate the linux style libraries(.a) on my windows 10 machine, but when i attempted to generate windows style dlls off the .o files(gcc -shared -o mydll.dll mydll.o) I ran into a large number of reference errors that I was unable to resolve.
Does anyone have any recommendations on which of these methods I should be using or if I should be attempting some other method entirely?
Does anyone have any good references or examples of how to do this for someone with limited Linux experience?
Thanks
Ok. I've tried going about this several ways now, and here's what I've learned that might be useful to someone else trying to do this and also where I stand so far:
If you have a simple Linux dll that you have written it's possible to compile it as a Windows dll using MSYS2 or MINGW, instructions are here: http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSVC_and_MinGW_DLLs
If you have something a bit more complicated like the program I'm trying to convert above, there is no quick fix to convert from Linux to windows, however you still might be able to compile your program for windows using Visual Studio.
Here's how you do it:
Download vcpkg from https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg This is a linux package manager for windows, it will allow you to download windows equivalents to many common Linux packages (for the above I had to download boost and sqlite3)
Create your own unistd.h, here's a link to that: Is there a replacement for unistd.h for Windows (Visual C)?
Get dirent.h for windows, here's a link to that: https://github.com/tronkko/dirent
replace instances of gmtime with _mkgmtime or redefine gmtime as _mkgmtime: timegm cross platform
This got me about 90% of the way there (and from about 13,000 compiler errors to about 30), The rest of the errors so far have been for calls where there is no easy linux to windows conversion and those sections of code have had to be re-written. (In the code above this would be the socket code for the tcp/udp connections in the tranport files, Linux and Windows handle it pretty differently, boost does have a good guide for how to use it's sockets in windows though: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_60_0/more/getting_started/windows.html)
So that's it. Hopefully this helps someone else down the line. I'll be adding more to this answer as I discover new things.
I have a MSVC++ 2010 project. All the libraries it's using are cross platform (SDL, OpenGL and FLTK).
Obviously, all I have to do right now is press the debug button and it will compile a nice old .exe for me which can now run on Windows, as long as the DLL files are with it.
I had thought before that if you use cross platform libraries, then the generated .exe would run fine on Ubuntu too. I recently found out that this is not possible, and that the program must be compiled in a special way to run on a certain platform.
Is it possible to compile my project in this magical way with MSVC++ 2010 so that it can run on a Ubuntu computer? If so, then could you please answer my question with some clear steps as to what I should do to compile it this way, keeping in mind I'm new to how all this cross platform stuff works?
EDIT:
If I cannot compile a MSVC++ 2010 project for Ubuntu, is there an IDE I could use that could compile the project for both Windows and Ubuntu?
Thanks.
I suggest you use QT. http://qt.digia.com/
It's probably the best cross platform IDE that can let you compile for Windows, Mac and Linux(ubuntu) systems.
Nope, not possible. While the binary code corresponding to the program can be portable, that's not enough. Executable formats on various file systems are different and not compatible. The executable format is essentially a packaging of the binary data and wrapping it with a header that the target file system understands. In order to produce executables for Ubuntu, the linker must support it. MSVC++ doesn't support Linux formats.
While the Microsoft compiler typically builds faster code, I'm in an environment where building Linux applications with gcc is required. I prefer MSVS and the Express versions as my IDE and have been able to configure it such that Intellisense and all the other nice features are working. However, I have been unable to find an easy way to get VC++ Express 2010 to build using gcc. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but I thought about half a decade ago there was support to switch compilers when using MSVS.
I have found an extension to download claiming to do this, but it costs about $50. Does anybody know of any free or open source tools that can accomplish the above?
Try CMake: http://www.cmake.org/. It is a cross-platform, cross-ide build system. It will generate
VS project for you, and ordinary makefiles (or eclipse, or what you need).
Then, use VS to edit the code, and "make" to build it. I did it myself to develop windows + linux on virtual machine. And it worked fine.
As I realize there are no plugins, but you could simply setup some custom build rules and make gcc compile your project instead of the cl.
Google for the Custom build rules in Visual Studio / provide your own makefile. Also note that if you wish to still have the ability to debug your applications, you should probably look for something like WinGDB.
The good thing in this approach is that you can switch your configurations from cl to gcc, for example and easily test if your application remains compilable in both of them.
Still, the best way would probably be to use some automatic building tools like cmake or scons, which simplify the process greatly and can help you to switch to any other IDE in a matter of minutes.
Personally I like scons, because it's python-driven, but cmake is very nice to start from.
I'm working on a cross-platform C/C++ code base that has Visual C++ (super majority) & XCode developers. It also needs to compile on Linux, because that's where it's deployed. We are currently using a complicated Unix makefile that's called from Visual C++, XCode, & Unix command line.
However, the makefile project causes several productivity losses for Visual C++ developers:
Slower build times
Intellisense & text search don't work well for files not directly referenced in project
No .h dependency generation (not clear how to do on Windows)
Adding a native Visual C++ project has the following downsides:
lots of work to manage all those separate platform configuration as mentioned here Maybe VC++ 2010's hierarchical property sheets will help.
more work due to syncing makefile with native project
Currently, I'm considering to add a native project for Windows developers. Can anyone offer their experience on what's best or suggest how those problems with either approach can be reduced.
I have considered CMake and personally would use it, but it's going to be hard to convince other people to learn cmake & syncing it with the native projects would be an issue.
I have considered CMake and personally would use it, but it's going to be hard to convince other people to learn cmake & syncing it with the native projects would be an issue.
The nice thing about CMake is that it builds ALL of the configurations for you. You would setup a single CMake project, and then use it to generate VS solutions, XCode projects, and unix makefiles for you.
It's a huge improvement - everybody gets to work in their "native" environment, whether they're on Windows, Mac, or Unix.
I've handled this by writing my own converter that would synch scripts for various embedded development environments. If something like the above answer of using CMake does all that for you, then that would be the way to go. But if its too complex, rolling your own custom tool is not that hard. Just has to synch both ways.
Also, if you don't have it. Visual Assist for visual studio is awesome :)
I am not a fan of makefile generators, cmake, qmake and the like.
I am a fan of make. We have a single makefile (well, several actually but they include each other and there is no recursive make involved) which knows all of the project dependencies on all platforms (windows, wince, linux, mac, ...). This gives:
Makefile is really no more than a list of sources (include dependencies are auto-generated during the build)
Same build command on each platform, apart from specifying the tool chain
Build uses all my CPUs
Very short time-to-do-nothing
Developers can use whatever IDE they fancy
vim, emacs, qtcreator, eclipse, XCode all in use
I often use VC++ when on Windows (for the debugger)
Scriptable. Great way to automate your tests
Nice.
I'm involved in C++ project targeted for Windows and Linux (RHEL) platforms. Till now the development was purely done on Visual Studio 2008. For Linux compilation we used 3rd party Visual Studio plugin, which read VS solution/perojects files and remotely compiled on Linux machine.
Recently the decision was to abandon the 3rd party plugin.
Now my big concern is a build system. I was looking around for cross platform build tools. This way I don't need to maintain two set of build files (e.g. vcproj/solution for Windows and make files for Linux).
I found the following candidates:
a. Scons
b. cmake
What do you think about the tools for cross-platfrom development?
Yet another point that bothers me is that Visual Studio (+ Visual Assist) will loose a lot functionality without vcproj files - how you handle the issue with the tools?
Thanks
Dima
PS 1: Something that I like about Scons is that it
(a) uses python and hence it's flexible, while cmake uses propriety language (I understand that it's not a winner feature for a build-system) (b) self contained (no need to generate makefiles on Linux as with cmake).
So why not Scons? Why in your projects the decision was to use cmake?
CMake will allow you to still use Visual Studio solutions and project files. Cmake doesn't build the source code itself, rather it generated build-files for you. For Linux this can be Code::Blocks, KDevelop or plain makefiles or still other more esoteric choices . For Windows it can be among others Visual Studio project files and still others for MacOS.
So Visual Studio solutions and projects are created from your CMakeLists.txt. This works for big projects just fine. E.g. current Ogre3d uses CMake for all platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS and IPhone) and it works really well.
I don't know much about scons in that regard though, I only used to build one library and only in Linux. So I can't compare these two on fair ground. But for our multi-platform projects CMake is strong enough.
I haven't used Scons before, so can't say how that works, but CMake works pretty well.
It works by producing the build files needed for the platform you're targeting.
When used to target VC++, it produces solution and project files so from VS, it appears as if they were native VS projects. The only difference is, of course, that if you edit the project or solution directly through VS, the changes will be erased the next time you run CMake, as it overwrites your project/solution files.
So any changes have to be made to the CMake files instead.
We have a big number of core libraries and applications based on those libraries. We maintain a Makefile based build system on Linux and on Windows using the Visual Studio solution for each project or library.
We find it works well for our needs, each library or app is developed either on linux or windows with cross compilation in mind (e.g. don't use platform specific api's). We use boost for stuff like file paths, threads and so on. In specific cases we use templates/#defines to select platform specific solution (for example events). When is ready we move to the other system (linux or windows), recompile, fix warnings/errors and test.
Instead of spending time figuring out tools that can cross compile on both platforms we use system that is best for each platform and spend time fixing specific issues and making the software better.
We have GUI apps only on Windows atm. so there's no GUI to cross compile. Most of our development that is shared between Windows and Linux is server side networking (sockets, TCP/IP, UDP ...) and then client side tools on Linux and GUI apps on Windows.
Using with perforce for source code version management we find in quite many cases that the Linux Makefile system is much more flexible for what we need then Windows VS. Especially for using multiple workspaces (views of source code versions) where we need to point to common directories and so on. On Linux this can be done automatically running a script to update environment variables, on Visual Studio referencing environment variables is very inflexible because it's hard to update automatically between views/branches.
Re sync question:
I assume you are asking how to make sure that the two build systems get synchronized between linux and windows. We are actually using Hudson on Linux and CruiseControl on Windows (we had windows first with cruise control, when I went to setup linux version I figured Hudson is better so now we have mixed environment). Our systems are running all the time. When something is updated it is tested and released (either windows or linux version) so you would know right away if it does not work. During testing we make sure all the latest features are there and fully functional. I guess that's it, no dark magic involved.
Oh you mean build scripts ... Each application has it's own solution, in solution you setup up dependencies. On Linux side I have a makefile for each project and a build script in project directory that takes care of all dependencies, this mostly means build core libraries and couple of specific frameworks required for given app. As you can see this is different for each platform, it is easy to add line to build script that changes to directory and makes required project.
It helps to have projects setup in consistent way.
On Windows you open project and add dependency project. Again no magic involved. I see this kind of tasks as development related, for example you added new functionality to a project and have to link in the frameworks and headers. So from my point of view there is no reason to automate these - as they are part of what developers do when they implement features.
Another options is premake. It's like cmake in that it generates solutions from definition files. It's open source and the latest version is very highly customizable using Lua scripting. We were able to add custom platform support without too much trouble. For your situation it has support for both Visual Studio and GNU makefiles standard.
See Premake 4.0 Homepage
CruiseControl is a good choice for continuous integration. We have it running on Linux using Mono with success.
Here is an article about the decision made by KDE developers to choose CMake over SCons. However I've to point that this article is almost three years old, so scons should have improved.
Here is comparison of SCons with other building tools.
Had to do this a lot in the past. What we did is use gnu make for virtually everything including windows at times.
You can use the project files under windows if you prefer and use gnu make for Linux.
There isn't really a nice way to write cross platform makefiles because the target file will
be different among other things (and pathname issues, \ vs / etc). In general, you'll probably be tweaking the code across the various platforms to take subtle differences into account, so a tweak to a make file and checking on the other platforms would have to happen
anyway.
Many OS projects maintain Makefiles for different platforms such as zlib where they are named like Makefile.win, Makefile.linux etc. You could follow their lead.