Our teacher requires us to submit a makefile with our Homeworks. What exactly is the use of a makefile and how can I go about generating it through code blocks ?
These are Makefiles. They serve as a guide for the make utility to build one's project. You typically "generate" one by knowing its syntax and writing it using a code editor.
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I'm really new to Qt creator and actually I think my very short experience with it didn't go so well.
Anyways, my question is:
I used to write C++ programs using Code::Blocks IDE, now I'm trying to make some simple GUI to my program. So that's really why I used Qt creator in the first place.
I have multiple C++ files (.cpp) and (.h) how can I use them into Qt and integrate both "Qt user interface" with my C++ files.
I tried to google about it but got nothing. If anyone can help me how to start, or point out some good tutorial.
You mostly need to write a Qt project file (with some .pro extension) for Qmake (perhaps using qmake -project), then use qmake to generate a Makefile, then use GNU make to build your program.
Qtcreator is an IDE which might help you, but if you want to use some other editor or IDE, you can run the commands mentioned above appropriately. Actually, once you have generated once your Makefile, it might be auto-regenerated appropriately when needed. So configuring your IDE to use make is probably enough.
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.
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 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.
So I have a visual studio 2008 project setup for a project I've been working on however its a sub project of a rather larger code base which is crossplatform, so in order to make my project complaint with the main source I need to make my project nix compilable.
Is there some way I can generate a makefile based off my vcproject? or if not is there someway I could generate a makefile any other way than writing it manually as it appears confusing as all hell when I open them up.
Microsoft has dropped the support for exporting a solution into a makefile (see this thread). I'm not aware of any external tools that convert VS solutions to makefiles.
But i had some success using CMake. With CMake you describe a project in a textfile and cmake then generates standard makefiles or project descriptions for IDE's (including VS).
Nobody ever writes a Makefile. They take an existing Makefile and modify it.
Get one of the makefiles from the existing projects and adjust it to your project (i.e. replace project name, source/object files, etc).
Other than that, simple makefiles are not so difficult, here's a very short introduction to makefiles to get you started.