I'd like to create a Makefile for a moderately sized C++ project (~110 .cpp and .h files) that was created in Xcode. I don't own a mac, so I can't just go into xcode and export a Makefile.
From my understanding of using Makefiles for simpler projects, I could go through and create a target in my Makefile for each .cpp file, including its prerequisites... but that would require manually looking through each file and sorting out what its dependencies are.
It's my understanding that autoconf is a good tool for this sort of problem, but I haven't been able to figure out how to set it up and I'm not even sure that it's the right tool for the job. So before I go even further down this rabbit hole --
What is the best way to create a Makefile for an existing project without one?
It is rather subjective as to the best tool. Perhaps look at SCONS or gradle to compare for your particular needs.
I think Pbxbuild may help you.
Pbxbuild (not to be confused with the OS X tool of the same name) is used to take Xcode project files and build the code. It does this by creating GNUmakefiles, and using Make to build those.
Any build system (generator) will require some learning on your part. I would suggest using CMake, if you do not mind that CMake will be required wherever anybody tries to build your source. Otherwise I would suggest using the Autoconf/Automake/Libtool combo.
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I am wondering how I should manage a growing C++ project. Now, I am developing a project with Netbeans and it's dirty work generating makefiles. The project has become too big and I have decided to split it up into a few parts. What is the best way of doing this?
I am trying to use Scons as my build system. I have had some success with it, but should I edit the build scripts every time I append or delete files. It's too dull.
So I need your advice.
P.S. By the way, how does a large project like google chrome do this? Does everybody use some kind of IDE to build scripts generated only for software distribution?
I also use Netbeans for C++ and compile with SCons. I use the jVi Netbeans plugin which really works well.
For some reason the Netbeans Python plugin is no longer official, which I dont understand at all. You can still get it though, and it really makes editing the SCons build scripts a nice experience. Even though Netbeans doesnt have a SCons plugin (yet?) you can still configure its build command to execute SCons.
As for maintaining the SCons scripts automatically by the IDE, I dont do that either, I do that by hand. But its not like I have to deal with this on a daily basis, so I dont see that its that important, especially considering how easy to read the scripts are.
Here's the build script in SCons that does the same as mentioned previously for CMake:
env = Environment()
env.EnsurePythonVersion(2, 5)
env.EnsureSConsVersion(2, 1)
libTarget = env.SharedLibrary(target = 'foo', source = ['a.cpp', 'b.cpp', 'c.pp'])
env.Program(target = 'bar', source = ['bar.cpp', libTarget])
The SCons Glob() function is a nice option, but I tend to shy away from automatically building all the files in a directory. The same goes for listing sub-directories to be built. Ive been burned enough times by this, and prefer explicitly specifying the file/dirs to be built.
In case you hear those rumors that SCons is slower than other alternatives, the SCons GoFastButton has some pointers that can help out.
Most large projects stick with a build system that automatically handles all the messy details for them. I'm a huge fan of CMake (which is what KDE uses for all their components) but scons is another popular choice. My editor (KDevelop) supposedly handles CMake projects itself, but I still edit the build scripts myself because it's not that hard.
I'd recommend learning one tool really well and sticking with it (plenty of documentation is available for any tool you'll be interested in). Be sure you also look into version control if you haven't already (I have a soft spot for git, but Mercurial and Subversion are also very popular choices).
A simple CMake example:
project("My Awesome Project" CXX)
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)
add_library(foo SHARED a.cpp b.cpp c.cpp) #we'll build an so file
add_executable(bar bar.cpp)
target_link_libraries(bar foo) #link bar to foo
This is obviously a trivial case, but it's very easy to manage and expand as needed.
I am trying to use Scons as build system. I have some success with it, but I should edit
build scripts every time I append or delete file. It's too dull.
Depending on how your files are organized, you can use, for example, Scon's Glob() function to get source files as a list without having to list all files individually. For example, to build all c++ source files into an executable, you can do:
Program('program', Glob('*.cpp'))
You can do the same in CMake using its commands.
And, if you're using SCons, since it's Python you can write arbitrary Python code to make your source file lists.
You can also organize files into multiple folders and have subsidiary SCons (or CMakeList.txt) build files that the master build script can call.
i have source code of vc++ project. Now I am using linux.
i know how compile a single file .cpp not a whole project. So how to compile a VC project using g++ ?
A slight advantage of Makefiles would be possible integration with autotools (cough - It might prove handy to get the starting point for feature macros).[2]
There is a tool as part of winemaker that is EXCEEDINGLY helpful with fixing up a source tree that was assuming case insensitive names to work on a case-sensitive filesystem. (_it was intended mainly in order to build against winelib but that is not required)
If you want to keep using windows API's for some parts of the code, you can consider compiling with winelib (and use winegcc, producing WIN32 executables; I'm not sure whether this is what you want)
[2]: SCons is a very nice tool though
First step would be to generate Makefile out of vcproj file.
There are (obviously) some tools for that:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cross-platform/sln2mak.aspx
There is no easy way to do it. As others have suggested you can figure out how the build process works for this project (maybe by reading the build output in VS) and recreate that using your favorite linux build tool (scons, cmake, autotools etc.). The alternative is to use a converter tool. Aside from the below mentioned sln2mak, there is also winemaker. The docs for winemaker have a lot of old info like most linux tools docs but it can convert a .sln to a makefile. I am not sure about newer vs .sln files.
I have a project containing C/C++ files. I'd like to build it without using make. What are my options? I'd like cross platform solutions if possible.
I've used SCons and it is very good.
SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.
I've also looked at cmake but have not seriously used it.
Well, you're always going to need some way to invoke the compiler. If it's a trivial project, you can usually just stick all the .C filenames on the command line of the compiler and get some kind of output.
Or you can use a batch file / shell script instead of a makefile, but it would be less 'cross-platform' than a makefile and much less useful.
You should probably explain your motivations more clearly.
Since you're going to use Boost anyways (right?) Boost.Jam might be an option.
I already used WAF in some of my projects and it worked out quite well.
If you are familiar with python...
A common alternative is to write python scripts to compile your code.
How are you editing you code? Can that system also build it for you?
Visual Studio, Eclipse, XCode, KDevelop? :-)
I am trying to open an existing C++ open-source library in Xcode to publish it with my own modification/additions. The library is Tesseract-OCR, which does not include a .xcodeproj file.
Since Xcode can function as an IDE, is it possible to open a bunch of files as a single project in Xcode? Is there an easy way to produce an Xcode project?
There are several ways you could do it, depending on the level of IDE integration you want. There's no direct way of importing a Makefile-based project into Xcode. You can create a project that builds via the Makefile, but you wouldn't get many of the benefits of using an IDE, since the editor features such as word completion rely on Xcode being able to parse the files in the project. You will be able to use the debugger though. To do this, create a new project and add a custom target with a script build phase that just calls down to Makefile.
If however the project you're building compiles very easily, ie without requiring a lot of macros to be set up, include paths, etc, then it may be simple to just create an empty project and merely add all source files to it. I've used this method extensively for building boost libraries. If this is a configure && make type project then you will probably have to run the configure step first, and ensure any top level config.h files are included in the project.
If the project has a complex makefile then it is likely to be an involved task to create a useful Xcode project
I realise you asked explicitly for Xcode, but in case you were actually trying to solve the problem of "I have existing C++ code which builds and runs fine from the command line, and I'd like to code and debug it in an IDE, what should I do?" my firm recommendation would be to avoid Xcode and go for Eclipse.
The reason is that as far as I can tell, Xcode has no way of ingesting the command line build environment and effectively requires you to recreate the make process inside Xcode from scratch. Fine for tiny projects, but anything with more than a few source files and it quickly becomes painful. Whereas in Eclipse everything is built around Makefiles. So in my case I got to the "step through code with working code completion" in Eclipse a lot quicker vs. never in Xcode. This of course could be because I'm an Xcode noob, but my 2c.
To create an Xcode project from an existing cmake project, you can run cmake -G Xcode. It produces some folders and files apart from the project file, so it might be better to create a folder for it first. For example:
mkdir -p build/xcode
cd build/xcode
cmake -G Xcode ../..
Xcode is a useable IDE for library creation.
Of course a good first step is to see if the one source code will build on its own with configure scripts that are included.
If not, it becomes a question of how many libraries you need to link in.
There are resources online (or at least there used to be) for using Xcode (or perhaps it's forerunner Product builder) for porting Unix projects to Mac.
Good tutorial at: http://www.macresearch.org/tutorial-introducing-xcode-30-organizer
Another good reference is Darwin Ports.
As for doing this on your own. You can build c++ based libraries in XCode. People do that every day. You can even use one of the Xcode templates to get you started.
However, library dev requires more experience with Xcode then say a simple Cocoa "Hello World" app.
The remaining questions will be assuring that the source code's dependencies are already built into the Mac's SDK. (Don't hold your breath for linking to MFC)
It's a general question... So it's a general answer.
In Xcode8,there is "Xcode->file->add files to...",then choose your files.If you want to add several files at a time,press "Cmd" when you are choosing.
I have a fairly complex Xcode project and I want to add Qt to it. I know that I can create a new project using qmake -spec macx-xcode project.pro but I don't want to have to hand configure my old project over the auto generated Qt project. Is there another option?
[edited in a more general question below]
It seems like it would be easier to simply use qmake as my build system. Hence, adding my old project build process to the .pro file and use that to generate a new .xcodeproj? I would only do this if I could comprehensively configure the .pro file so that I don't have to hand configure the .xcodeproj - is this doable? I really don't want to have to mess around with hand configuring the .xcodeproj each time I run qmake.
Essentially, is qmake (or a meta-build in general) a valid substitute for a normal build system, such that I don't need to tweak the resulting build system generated by qmake?
Are there better resources besides the manual and tutorial provided by Trolltech? I'm concerned that wikipedia says that qmake is primarily for internal use and not well documented.
One of the main points of using Qt is the portability of the Gui. It only makes sense to extend this feature to your build process by using qmake and allowing users/developers generate whichever build system they want to use (make, visualstudio, xcode).
No, qmake is not well documented and more poignantly there are not manifold examples like there are for make. But, it is similar to make and should be intuitive. Why not absorb the overhead to learn it and pass the benefit on to your users/developers?
Build an empty xcode project with qmake and incorporate the compiler settings to your existing project from the generated Makefile. Of course, you will have to set up your existing project to run qmake as a pre-build step if you are using Qt-specific extensions.
What do you think is the easiest method for integrating established projects with Qt?
That depends on the nature of your work. I wish I could have given a more specific answer here but I really can't. Also, are you using Qt professional? In that case, you can get support (at least that's how it was, during 3.3 when I last worked on it for anything production-quality). If all you care about Qt is the graphics part, I'd say don't bother changing your build system, rather see to it that you get the code to compile and link and run just fine. But, if you are going to use signals and slots and what not -- think about moving over.
Would you recommend I do the xcodeproj merge I asked about and which you answered, or should I start from scratch with qmake like I edited a question about?
Again, look at the size of your project. Assuming a fairly complex project, I'd hazard a guess that you have about 2/3 man-days worth of effort to rewrite the build system? Is this project a serious one, something that will be maintained over a period of time? Is this cross-platform? Will you be using Qt throughout?
If there is an overbearing reason to feel that Qt is the way forward I'd suggest that you start using their build system.
It's really, really, really nice to have a single IDE and debugger that works on all the platforms you are writing for, but I have found that it's also pretty nice to just use the native tools.
Once you put in the time to learn each build system, it's pretty easy to maintain the projects to a very precise degree.