General ======= For more information about the port or GLib, GTk+ and the GIMP to native Windows, and pre-built binary packages, see http://www.iki.fi/tml/gimp/win32/ . "Native" means that we use the Win32 API only, and not any POSIX emulation layer except that provided by the Microsoft runtime C library. Additionally, a pthreads emulation library is used. To build GLib on Win32, you can use either the Microsoft compiler and tools, or gcc. Both the compiler from MSVC 5.0 and from MSVC 6.0 have been used successfully. With gcc I mean the gcc-2.95 pre-release as distributed by Mumit Khan, running under cygwin-b20.1. To successfully use gcc, follow the instructions below. We want to use gcc -mno-cygwin, i.e. produce executables (.exe and .dll files) that do *not* require the cygwin runtime library. This is sometimes called "mingw32". To test the GLib functions, go to the tests subdirectory and enter `nmake -f makefile.msc check` or `make -f makefile.cygwin check`. If you would want to use the cygwin tools to generate executables that *do* use the cygwin runtime, the normal Unix configuration method should work as if on Unix. But it won't produce DLLs. At least I haven't succeeded in that. With a little work, it might be possible to use the ./configure mechanism also with a "mingw32" configuration. The following preprocessor macros are defined in glibconfig.h and used for conditional compilation related to Win32: - WIN32 is defined when compiling for the Win32 platform, regardless if using the X11 or Win32 windowing API (in the case of GLib, this dimension isn't significant), regardless whether using a more or less complete POSIX emulation runtime layer (like Cygwin) or not. - NATIVE_WIN32 is defined when compiling for Win32, *and* without any POSIX emulation, other that to the extent provided by the bundled Microsoft C library (msvcrt.dll) and the pthreads-win32 library. For instance, pathnames are in the native Windows syntax. The Win32 port uses the combination with both of those on. As these are in glibconfig.h, they are available to all source files that use GLib (or GTk+, which uses GLib). Additionally, there are the compiler-specific macros: - _MSC_VER is defined when using the Microsoft compiler - __GNUC__ is defined when using GCC Some of the usage of these macros used to be a bit mixed up, and had to be straightened out when adding the gcc support. In particular, I used to check for _MSC_VER in some places where I really wanted to check for the Microsoft C library, and those checks has now been changed to NATIVE_WIN32. NATIVE_WIN32 ought to be renamed to USE_MSVCRT. Pthreads library ================ Before building you must get the pthreads library for Win32 from http://sourceware.cygnus.com/pthreads-win32/. The pthreads-win32 snapshot from 1999-05-30 is the one that should be used. Edit the location of the pthreads library and include files in makefile.msc or makefile.cygwin. The pthreads distribution includes the precompiled dll and import libraries both for MSVC and gcc. The pthreads for Win32 package that the thread support uses supposedly isn't quite ready yet, and thus threads stuff should not be relied upon for anything serious. Where are the makefiles? ======================== If you are building from a CVS snapshot, you will not have any makefile.msc or makefile.cygwin file. You should copy the corresponding makefile.msc.in or makefile.cygwin.in file to that name, and edit the line that sets GLIB_VER to the correct version number. This is done automatically when an official distribution package is built. Building with MSVC ================== If using the Microsoft toolchain, build with `nmake -f makefile.msc`. Install with `nmake -f makefile.msc install`. Building with gcc ================= The gcc support was added quite recently, but seems to work. Debugging with gdb works. I use the latest and greatest gcc and mingw32. Somewhat earlier versions will also work, but you are on your own. Fetch the gcc-2.95 developer snapshot from ftp://ftp.xraylith.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/cygwin/snapshots/gcc-2.95-19990715/. Install it somewhere, for instance \gcc-2.95. Fetch the mingw runtime snapshot from 1999-07-15 from ftp://ftp.xraylith.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/mingw32/runtime/. You must fix two bugs in it: 1) Fix the prototype and call to __getmainargs() in init.c to include one more parameter, an int *, which should be passed the address of a zero int. Code snippets below: ... #ifdef __MSVCRT__ extern void __getmainargs(int *, char***, char***, int, int *); #else ... #ifdef __MSVCRT__ int newmode = 0; (void) __getmainargs(&_argc, &_argv, &dummy_environ, _CRT_glob, &newmode); #else ... 2) Fix the type of the function __p___argv() in stdlib.h to be char***, not char**. Build the mingw32 runtime and install the libraries in the gcc-2.95\H-i586-cygwin32\lib directory, and the headers in the gcc-2.95\H-i586-cygwin32\i586-cygwin32\include\mingw32 directory. Remember to build and install also the w32api import libraries and headers. I prefer to use the msvcrt runtime and not the default crtdll. Especially, as the pthread library also uses msvcrt, using crtdll would probably not be a good idea at all. Using msvcrt can be achieved by applying a few changes to the specs file. The specs file is in gcc-2.95\H-i586-cygwin32\lib\gcc-lib\i586-cygwin32\2.95 The necessary changes are: replace -lcrtdll with -lmsvcrt, replace crt1 with crt2, change -lmoldname to -lmoldname-msvc, and define __MSVCRT__. Next, go back to the GLib directory and build using `make -f makefile.cygwin`. Building the dlls uses the script build-dll which is somewhat of a hack. But I couldn't get things working in a cleaner way. --Tor Lillqvist