Glib cannot be built statically on Windows because glib, gobject and gio
modules need to perform specific initialization when DLL are loaded and
cleanup when unloaded. Those initializations and cleanups are performed
using the DllMain function which is not called with static builds.
Issue is known for a while and solutions were already proposed but never
merged (see: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/692). Last
patch is from version 2.36.x and since then the
"constructor/destructor" mechanism has been implemented and used in
other part of the system.
This patch takes back the old idea and updates it to the last version of
glib to allow static compilation on Windows.
WARNING: because DllMain doesn't exist anymore in static compilation
mode, there is no easy way of knowing when a Windows thread finishes.
This patch implements a workaround for glib threads created by calling
g_thread_new(), so all glib threads created through glib API will behave
exactly the same way in static and dynamic compilation modes.
Unfortunately, Windows threads created by using CreateThread() or
_beginthread/ex() will not work with glib TLS functions. If users need
absolutely to use a thread NOT created with glib API under Windows and
in static compilation mode, they should not use glib functions within
their thread or they may encounter memory leaks when the thread finishes.
This should not be an issue as users should use exclusively the glib API
to manipulate threads in order to be cross-platform compatible and this
would be very unlikely and cumbersome that they may mix up Windows native
threads API with glib one.
Closes#692
So long, and thanks for everything. We’re a Meson-only shop now.
glib-2-58 will remain the last stable GLib release series which is
buildable using autotools.
We continue to install autoconf macros for autotools-using projects
which depend on GLib; they are stable API.
Signed-off-by: Philip Withnall <withnall@endlessm.com>
1) Remove the non-Windows-only condition for subdir('tests').
2) Add libiphlpapi, libws2_32 and libsecur32 deps, needed for W32 tests.
3) Remove the -no-undefined argument (gcc doesn't understand it,
it *does* understand -Wl,-no-undefined; either way, the test
compiles without this argument just fine; maybe meson adds it
by itself - you can hardly build shared modules without it).
4) Add or fix a number of includes
5) Disable gdbus-objectmanager tests when building with MSVC
(right now these tests don't work on Windows anyway, so the fact
that MSVC can't even build them properly is irrelevant;
most likely gdbus-codegen needs changes to put _GLIB_EXTERN
before each function)
Properly define GLIB/GOBJECT_STATIC_COMPILATION when static build is enabled.
Use library() instead of shared_library() to allow selecting static builds.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=784995
Some platforms use different extensions for compile-time linkable
libraries vs runtime-loadable modules. Need to use special libtool
flag in the latter case for consistency with what gmodule expects.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=731703
giomodule test needed symbol visibility pragmas added. This is needed on
Windows anyway, so it's better to do it this way rather than disabling
-fvisibility=hidden for the test modules.
Disable gio tests on Windows, fix .gitignore to not ignore
config.h.meson, and add more things to it.
Rename the library file naming and versioning to match what Autotools
outputs, e.g., libglib-2.0.so.0.5000.2 on Linux, libglib-2.0-0.dll and
glib-2.0-0.dll on Windows with MSVC.
Several more tiny fixes, more executables built and installed, install
pkg-config and m4 files, fix building of gobject tests.
Changes to gdbus-codegen to support out-of-tree builds without
environment variables set (which you can't in Meson). We now add the
build directory to the Python module search path.
If installed tests are not enabled, installed_testdir is not
defined, so we end up trying to create /modules and to chmod
things in /x-content/, which is not right.