I need to convert several large Visual Studio projects to use GNU build tools. GUI IDE is no option. Right now I am trying to learn make & autotools. There are some good tutorials online, including the official documentation. But the amount of material is quite overwhelming. I would really appropriate any newbie advice.
Where to start?
What are the typical steps?
How make make the project ready for source code distribution?
What can be skipped if source code distribution isn't needed (in house use only)?
Thanks.
I suggest you to use CMake. You could start here.
Like both Naszta and Fabio recommended: Try out CMake, because it can generate visual studio projects on windows and unix-makefiles.
In addition, I would suggest you look at MinGW: MinGW provides a GCC toolchain on Windows. You can start by porting your code to MinGW, while keeping all the windows-specific stuff. In a later phase you can try getting rid of all the windows-specific stuff.
Are you set on Autotools? Because most projects migrate away from them because autotools are so complicated.
Id also suggest CMake which is a Meta build system, and can create unix makefiles, Visual Studio Projects (and all kinds of project files for IDEs) in a platform neutral way.
It also has some goodies like CPack (which creates Installer packages for all platforms) and CTest.
Related
I am creating a very large project (a few thousand lines) and so would rather not use Notepad++. An IDE would make it so much easier. I have experience with Microsoft Visual Studio and love it. Is there some easy way to use Cygwin's GCC from within Microsoft Visual Studio?
Alternately, are there any other good Windows IDEs for GCC besides NetBeans and Eclipse? (I hate both of them with a passion.)
There are several ways to go here:
Option 1: Create a Custom Build Tool
Visual Studio 2005 and newer will let you register custom build tools. They tell the IDE how to transform files of one form (e.g. a .cpp file) into another form (e.g. an .obj file).
So far as I know, no one has done this yet for GCC. And, doing it yourself requires writing COM code, which is probably too deep a pool to dive into just for a single project. You'd have to have a compelling reason to take this project on.
You then have to manually adjust each project to tell it to use the custom build tool instead of the default, since you're using a file name extension (.cpp, probably) that Visual C++ already knows about. You'll run into trouble if you try to mix the VC++ and g++ compilers for a single executable built from multiple modules.
On the plus side, if you were looking to start an open source project, this sounds like a good one to me. I expect you'd quickly gather a big user base.
Option 2: Makefile Project
Start Visual Studio and say File > New Project.
In the Visual C++ section, select Makefile Project
Fill out the Makefile Project Wizard:
Build command line: make
Clean commands: make clean
Rebuild command line: make clean all
You can leave the Output (for debugging) field alone if you've named your executable after the project name and it lands where Visual Studio expects to find it.
Leave the rest of the fields alone unless you know what they are and why you want to change them. As an example, you might choose to pass a -D flag on the Preprocessor definitions line to get separate debug and release outputs. If you know you want this, you know how to set it up, so I'm not going to make this long answer even longer in order to explain it.
You'll be asked the same set of questions for the Release build. If you want to bother with separate debug and release builds, you'd make any changes here.
Having done all this, you still have to create the Makefile, and add a make.exe to your PATH. As with the debug vs. release question, going into that level of detail would push this answer off topic.
As ugly as this looks, it's still easier than creating custom build tools. Plus, you say you need to port to Unix eventually, so you're going to need that Makefile anyway.
Option 3: Cross-Platform Development
You say you want to port this program to Unix at some point, but that doesn't mean you must use GCC on Windows now. It is quite possible to write your program so that it builds under Visual C++ on Windows and GCC/Makefiles on *ix systems.
There are several tools that make this easier. One very popular option is CMake, which is available as an installation time option in newer versions of Visual Studio. There are many alternatives such as SCons and Bakefile.
Clang
You can use the Clang compiler with Visual Studio to target Android, iOS, and Windows.
If you are targeting Android, you can use the Clang/LLVM compiler that ships with the Android NDK and toolchain to build your project. Likewise, Visual Studio can use Clang running on a Mac to build projects targeting iOS. Support for Android and iOS is included in the “Mobile Development with C++” workload. For more information about targeting Android or iOS check out our posts tagged with the keywords “Android” and “iOS”.
If you are targeting Windows, you have a few options:
Use Clang/LLVM; “Clang for Windows” includes instructions to install Clang/LLVM as a platform toolset in Visual Studio.
Use Clang to target Windows with Clang/C2 (Clang frontend with Microsoft Code Generation).
GCC
If your project targets Linux or Android, you can consider using GCC. Visual Studio’s C++ Android development natively supports building your projects with the GCC that ships with the Android NDK, just like it does for Clang. You can also target Linux – either remotely or locally with the Windows Subsystem for Linux – with GCC.
Check out our post on Visual C++ for Linux Development for much more info about how to use Visual Studio to target Linux with GCC. If you are specifically interested in targeting WSL locally, check out Targeting WSL from Visual Studio.
Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/use-any-c-compiler-with-visual-studio/
I'm from the future.
I keep (poking at) a C/C++ toolchain using Visual Code on Win/Lin/Mac and MinGW installed from Choclatey.
(This was done for my sanity - install GDB and GCC however you want)
I've run it with GCC and GDB with IntelliSense using MS's own weird JSON makefiles.
Someday, someone (you?) will write a Gradle or Python script to generate these; for now the examples online in the docs seem to work.
It seems to require three types of JSON thing;
a single IntelliSense configuration for the whole workspace
a Debugging Configuration entry for each binary you want to debug
these can invoke the build tasks
a Build Task per-artifact
I don't think that there's a "require" or "dependency" thingie-mah-bob; sorry
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 am starting to write a moderately sized project in C++ requiring a fairly large amount of files and dependencies on other projects.
Do you think manually maintaining a Makefile for this project is the best approach?
Are there other better alternatives for C++ that make build management and dependency management of files really easy to handle?
Also, what IDE is good for C++ development on Linux? I am comfortable with Vim, but do you think there are good IDEs for C++ (like Eclipse for Java) that provide code-completion etc?
Thanks!
Ajay
Others have already recommended using CMake. To my mind you should manage your project with CMake then decide on your favourite IDE.
CMake allows you to describe the project to be built, instead of how to build it. For example: I want to create a shared library called foo with source files a.cpp, b.cpp and c.h and it requires these link dependencies. Then on unix you get libfoo.so and on windows you get foo.dll and foo.lib. All common project settings can be abstracted up to higher levels in the build tree, this keeps most files very simple. More complicated requirments can be refactored into macros.
Once your project is described like this CMake will generate makefiles and/or IDE projects. This means each developer can choose their own IDE, as well as allowing you to mandate an IDE if appropriate.
My company use CMake to build the c++ in our product on windows and solaris. It contains 600 projects and 1.5 million lines of source code. We originally chose it as a cross platform build utility when porting to solaris, however for a large project like ours it is much easier to manage the build with CMake than with Visual Studio project files. I would recommend it as a build utility for any c++ project of any size
We use the eclipse cdt on solaris and are very happy with it. Most of our development is with visual studio on windows. cmake also works well with other ides I use it with KDeveloper4 on linux at home without a hitch.
KDevelop4 (from subversion or rc1 from their site) + CMake makes life so much easier, automake should just die.
If you want a cross-platform solution, netbeans + the c++ plugin are pretty decent, not as good as kdevelop4 though.
I like CMake a lot for the whole building process (but I have almost no experience with scons or Jam).
I use vim or qtcreator. Qtcreator is still in developpment, but very promising I think.
I suggest you Code::Blocks. I use it on Debian and works gracefully.
http://www.codeblocks.org/
Edit: Added another link
http://wiki.codeblocks.org/index.php?title=The_build_process_of_Code::Blocks
Eclipse does C++ as well - through eclipse CDT - not as comprehensive as Java but pretty good.
Manually maintaining Makefiles in larger Projects becomes quite painful. If you start using automake/autoconf, you will - after a while of learning all the facets - appreciate the powerful possibilities these tools can offer.
And as IDE simply use Emacs. It's quick, powerful and supports Code completion etc.
There's also Code::Blocks as an IDE with its own building system. But I would encourage you to try out other build tools (CMake, Boost.Build, SCons) if you want to be able to build your software "anywhere" without having a fancy schmancy IDE installed. ;-)
I found Emacs + Scons works pretty well for me.
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.