README.win32.md

Building glibmm on Win32

Currently, both the mingw (native win32) gcc compiler and MS Visual Studio 2017 and later are supported. glibmm can be built with mingw32-gcc using the gnu autotools (automake, autoconf, libtool). As explicitly stated in the gtk+ for win32 distribution (http://www.gimp.org/win32/), the gcc compiler provided by the cygwin distribution should not be used to build glib/glibmm libraries and/or applications (see the README.win32 that comes with the gtk+ DLLs). This MIGHT cause conflicts between the cygwin and msvcrt runtime environments.

If building against libsigc++-3.6.0 or later with Visual Studio, it is recommended to use Visual Studio 2019 or later for best support-building with maximum warning level and treating warnings as errors with Visual Studio 2017 with libsigc++-3.6.x or later is not supported.

Mingw

The mingw distribution which has been tested with this release is the following :

• MinGW-4.1 as the base distribution.

The bare mingw distribution does not provide the necessary tools (sh, perl, m4 , autoconf, automake, ...) to run the provided configure script "as is". One (currently non supported) solution is to use mingw in conjunction with msys, which is readily available on the mingw website (http://www.mingw.org/).

The preferred method is to combine the cygwin distribution (for the unix tools that were mentioned above) with mingw by making sure that the mingw tools (gcc, ld, dlltool, ...) are called first.

First, make sure that you have working distribution of the native port of both libsigc++-3.x and glib-2.0 on win32 (see http://www.gimp.org/win32). If you can't compile a simple glib example using gcc and pkg-config --cflags --libs, you should not even think about trying to compile glibmm, let alone using precompiled libglibmm DLLs to port your glibmm application !

The configure script can then be called using (as an example) the following options

./configure --prefix=/target --build=i386-pc-mingw32 --disable-static

make
make check
make install

MS Visual Studio 2017 or later

In a Visual Studio command prompt, navigate to the MSVC_NMake directory. Run nmake /f Makefile.vc CFG=[release|debug] to build the glibmm and giomm DLLs, along with their example programs. If a prefix other than $(srcroot)\..\vs15\$(Platform) is desired, pass in PREFIX=$(your_prefix) in the NMake command line. In order to build the giomm settings example program, the glib-compile-schemas tool needs to reside in $(PREFIX)\bin, or it must be specified via passing in GLIB_COMPILE_SCHEMAS=... in the NMake command line. If using C++ dependencies that are built with Meson, specify USE_MESON_LIBS=1 in your NMake command line.

The following list lists the $(VSVER) and the vc14x in the NMake-built DLLs and .lib's that corresponds to the Visual Studio version used (Visual Studio versions before 2017 are not supported):

• 2017: 15, <libname>-vc141-2_68.[dll|pdb|lib]
• 2019: 16, <libname>-vc142-2_68.[dll|pdb|lib]
• 2022: 17: <libname>-vc143-2_68.[dll|pdb|lib]

For Meson, the DLL/PDB filenames and .lib filenames will be like:

• 2017: <libname>-vc141-2.68-1.[dll|pdb], <libname>-vc141-2.68.lib
• 2019: <libname>-vc142-2.68-1.[dll|pdb], <libname>-vc142-2.68.lib
• 2022: <libname>-vc143-2.68-1.[dll|pdb], <libname>-vc143-2.68.lib

Notice that this is no longer the vc$(VSVER)0 that was used before, to be consistent with other common C++ libraries such as Boost. Earlier gtkmm versions may still use the former vc$(VSVER)0 naming scehme, so for situations like where rebuilding code using glibmm became inconvenient, a USE_COMPAT_LIBS=1 NMake option is provided to use the older naming scheme. (or use -Dmsvc14x-parallel-installable=false in the Meson configure command line to avoid having the toolset version in the final DLL and .lib filenames); again, this is only recommended if it is inconvenient to re-build the dependent code.

For the NMake builds, the following targets are supported:

• all (or no target specified): Build the glibmm and giomm DLLs and .lib, along with the example programs
• tests: Build the test programs for glibmm and giomm.
• install: Copy the built glibmm and giomm DLLs, .lib's and headers to appropriate locations under $(PREFIX).
• clean: Remove all the built files. This includes the generated sources if building from a GIT checkout, as noted below.

The NMake Makefiles support passing in the following items, with the defaults (everyone of the following are optional if the paths of needed headers, libraries and tools are in %INCLUDE%, %LIB% and %PATH% unless otherwise noted):

• BASE_TOOLS_PATH (default: $(PREFIX)\bin: Location where tools can be located
• BASE_INCLUDES (default: $(PREFIX)\include: Base directory where dependencies' headers can be located
• BASE_LIBPATH (default: $(PREFIX)\lib: Base directory where dependencies' libraries and architecture-dependent or compiler-dependent headers can be located
• <DEP>_INCLUDEDIR (default: $(BASE_INCLUDES)): Base directory where 's headers can be found in their respective subdirectories as applicable, so for instance GLib's headers can be found in $(GLIB_INCLUDEDIR)\glib-2.0 and $(GLIB_INCLUDEDIR)\gio-win32-2.0. here currently covers GLIB and LIBSIGC
• <DEP>_LIBDIR (default: $(BASE_LIBPATH)): Base directory where 's architecture- and compiler-dependent headers and .lib's can be found in their respective subdirectories as applicable, so for instance GLib's glibconfig.h can be found in $(GLIB_LIBDIR)\glib-2.0\include. here currently covers GLIB and LIBSIGC.
• <DEP>_BINDIR (default: $(BASE_TOOLS_PATH)`): Base directory where 's utility programs can be found. here currently covers GLIB.
• GLIB_COMPILE_SCHEMAS (default: $(GLIB_BINDIR)\glib-compile-schemas): Relative or full path where GLib's glib-compile-schemas tool can be located, i.e., if glib-compile-schemas is in %PATH%, you may opt to just pass in GLIB_COMPILE_SCHEMAS=glib-compile-schemas.

The NMake Makefiles now support building the glibmm libraries directly from a GIT checkout with a few manual steps required, namely:

• Ensure that you have a copy of Cygwin or MSYS/MSYS64 installed, including m4.exe and sh.exe. You should also have a PERL for Windows installation as well, and your %PATH% should contain the paths to your PERL interpreter and the bin\ directory of your Cygwin or MSYS/MSYS64 installation, it is recommended that these paths are towards the end of your %PATH%. You need to install the XML::Parser PERL module as well for your PERL installation, which requires libexpat.

• Make a new copy of the entire source tree to some location, where the build is to be done; then in $(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake run nmake /f Makefile.vc CFG=[release|debug], which will first copy and generate the following files with the proper info (mote that this step will also be run if the following files are not present in the unpacked source tarball, meaning that in this case a PERL installation needs to be found in PATH or specified in the NMake commandline with PERL=<path_to_perl.exe>):

$(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake\glibmm\glibmmconfig.h
$(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake\giomm\giommconfig.h
$(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake\glibmm\glibmm.rc
$(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake\giomm\giomm.rc
$(srcroot)\tools\gmmproc
$(srcroot)\tools\generate_wrap_init.pl

For giommconfig.h, it is recommended to keep GIOMM_STATIC_LIB and GIOMM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED undefined unless you know what you are doing (remember, the NMake Makefiles only support DLL builds out-of-the-box, and we don't generally support static builds). For builds from the release tarballs, running nmake /f Makefile.vc CFG=[release|debug] gen-perl-scripts-real will also generate $(srcroot)\tools\gmmproc and $(srcroot)\tools\generate_wrap_init.pl for you.

Note that to generate any of the above 6 files, a PERL installation is also required.

For building with Meson, please see README.md for further instructions. Please note that using -Ddefault_library=[static|both] for Visual Studio builds is not supported and is thus not allowed._

When building with Meson, if building from a GIT checkout or if building with maintainer-mode enabled, you will also need a PERL interpreter and the m4.exe and sh.exe from Cygwin or MSYS/MSYS64, and you will need to also install Doxygen, LLVM (likely needed by Doxygen) and GraphViz unless you pass in -Dbuild-documentation=false in your Meson configure command line. You will still need to have mm-common installed with its bin directory in your %PATH%

Glibmm methods and signals not available on win32

All glibmm methods and signals are available on win32.