README.win32

Building glibmm on Win32
===========================

Currently, both the mingw (native win32) gcc compiler and MS Visual
Studio 2015 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.

1. 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++-2.10.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

then

make
make check
make install

2. MS Visual Studio 2015

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
$(srcroot)\..\vs$(VSVER)\$(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 needs to reside in $(PREFIX)\bin, or
it must be specified via passing in GLIB_COMPILE_SCHEMAS.

Note that $(VSVER) refers to 14 for Visual Studio 2015 and 15 for Visual
Studio 2017.

A 'tests' target will build the test programs for glibmm and giomm, an
'install' target is provided to copy the built DLLs and LIBs, along with
with the public headers to appropriate subdirs of $(PREFIX).  A 'clean'
target is also provided to remove all the built files.

3. Glibmm methods and signals not available on win32

All glibmm methods and signals are available on win32.