Re[2]: Re[2]: Re[2]: Compiling for Windows [Was: argv revisited]

["Andrew Robinson" <arobinson18 cox net>]

I just found the link to MSVC 2013 on Microsoft's site. Visual Studio is not
free, Visual Studio Express or Community is free. It will still require me to
uninstall my current version of MSVC in order to run this older version,
because different versions of MSVC on the same computer do not play well
togther, and this is not a trivial thing to do but it is doable. Sure would be
nice though, if GTK supported the Windows community by having a MSVC 2015/2016
or Code::Blocks or GCC version of this.

So all I had to do to find the instructions to fetch the compiled Win32
binaries for GTK+, is go to Google and do a search for "Nachos blog" -- why
didn't I think of that from the very beginning? Are there any other off the
beaten path blogs that say the same thing, or is this the only one? And the
instructions aren't really complete. It isn't as simple as "go to the MSYS2
site, download, and run it". Some of the packages that you need to download to
MSYS2, will either not install or will not work properly if your path contains
spaces or UNICODE (it's that ugly Windows UTF-16 thing again). And the GTK
dlls it creates are outdated, notably the libglib.dll. And by the way, don't
worry about all that extra junk that pacman puts on your computer, it's there
for a reason. I also really enjoy all that talk about forking the compiler
source code, you know, in case the main branch doesn't work. That will
certainly make the project all the more maintainable (not). I would have to
research each and every line of those instructions from
https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/08/01/how-to-build-your-gtk-application-on-windows/
to make sure I knew how to do it, and what each command line option means, if
the instructions still work, so if I ran into problems (like the UTF-16
thing), I would know what went wrong and how to fix it, otherwise it most
definitely is not complete because of all the "gotchas".

I have an idea! Why doesn't someone just compile all the binaries for Win32
and Win64 and make them available on the Internet, that way none of us will
have to go through all this stupid BS just to get some binaries? Just two
packages, one for Win32 and one for Win64, using only just the command line
options that
https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/08/01/how-to-build-your-gtk-application-on-windows/
tell us to use.

On 5/3/2016 at 3:29 PM, Paolo Borelli <paolo borelli gmail com> wrote: 


On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 11:52 PM, Andrew Robinson <arobinson18 cox net> wrote:

The website, https://github.com/wingtk/gtk-win32, looks really good at first
glance, until you read the fine print where it says, "Any version of VS apart
from 2013 is not supported". What if I don't have VS 2013, what then? You
can't download it from Microsoft's website although you can buy it for $400+
from Amazon.


MSVC Community Edition if free (free as in beer, not free software) and works
just fine.



Mingw doesn't have any binaries for GTK+, it is a compiler and you have to
download 27 sub-projects that the GTK+ toolkit is comprised of, then compile
them all with the (hopefully) proper command line switches to get binaries. It
is a laborious and a very, very poorly documented process. Again, no thank
you.




Not really. It is a matter of running a couple of commands and you fetch the
compiled binaries for gtk.
This old blog post is still valid
https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/08/01/how-to-build-your-gtk-application-on-windows/



I have never seen a cross-compiled version of Fedora. Is it related to the
mythical Chimera?




Not sure because I do not do cross compiling (we use both the above methods in
production to distribute windows applications). As far as I know it is just a
matter of "dnf installl gtk3-mingw64" or something similar.




Paolo