README.win32 - Building FLTK under Windows ------------------------------------------ Last Update: July 2010 for release 1.3.x INTRODUCTION This document is split into two main sections. The first describes several possible build environments, while the second describes some of the issues associated with using the GNU-like build configurations in the "makefiles" subdirectory. FLTK 1.3 and later is officially supported on Windows (2000,) 2003, XP, and later. Older Windows versions are not officially supported, but may still work. The main reason is that the OS version needs to support UTF-8. FLTK 1.3 is known to work on Windows 7 and Vista. FLTK currently supports the following development environments on the Windows platform: - Free Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express and Visual C++ 2010 Express using the supplied workspace and project files. Older and the commercial versions can be used as well, if they can open the project files. Be sure to get your service packs! The project files can be found in the ide/ directory. Please read ide/README.IDE for more info about this. - GNU toolsets (Cygwin or MinGW) hosted on Windows. - Watcom. There is a partial solution for the Watcom toolchain. It is no longer actively maintained. The remainder of this document gives a brief overview of compiling and using FLTK with the Cygwin and MinGW compiler toolkits. Both toolkits provide a build environment based around the GNU C/C++ compiler. Further information is available from the FLTK website at http://www.fltk.org, such as this Howto note: http://www.fltk.org/articles.php?L598 The Cygwin build environment supplies a library (the Cygwin DLL) that is primarily intended to provide a number of Unix-like POSIX facilities for programs being ported to the Windows environment (Win32 or WinNT). Cygwin also supplies a very Unix-like build environment for Windows, including the "BASH" Bourne-compatible shell and all of the standard Unix file utilities (ls, cat, grep, etc.). Cygwin is developed by Cygnus (now part of RedHat, Inc). Although provided for free download under the GPL, distributing programs that require the Cygwin DLL under a license other than the GPL requires a commercial license for the Cygwin DLL. Native Windows programs that do not require the Cygwin DLL (compiled and linked with the "-mno-cygwin" option) may be released under any license freely. Note: Since December 2009, there is a new gcc 4.x compiler that doesn't support the -mno-cygwin option anymore. You must use the older gcc-3 compiler instead. The MinGW distribution (Minimalist GNU for Windows) provides a similar toolset but geared solely towards native Windows development without the Unix-like POSIX library. The lack of any libraries under the GPL or any other restrictive license means that programs built with the MinGW environment may always be released under any license freely. MinGW also supplies a Unix-like build environment for Windows, including MSYS (a Bourne-compatible shell) and the standard Unix file utilities (ls, cat, grep, etc.) If you are not familiar with these GNU-like toolkits please refer to the links section later in this note. In particular, check out their license conditions carefully before use. THE TOOLS There are currently three main configurations supported by FLTK with the GNU tools: 1. Cygwin: Built using the Cygwin toolset and using the Unix-like POSIX compatibility layer provided by the Cygwin DLL. 2. Cygwin using the "-mno-cygwin" option: Built using the Cygwin toolset but not using the Cygwin DLL. 3. MinGW: Built using the MinGW utilities, compiler and tools. This is, in many aspects, analogous to the Cygwin "-mno-cygwin" option. RECOMMENDED BUILD ENVIRONMENTS Our recommendation is to: 1. Get the current Cygwin toolset. This can either produce executables that do or do not rely on the Cygwin DLL (check licensing) at your choice. 2. Get the latest MinGW toolset. It is recommended that you also get the MSYS shell and the msysDTK developer toolset. This will only produce normal Windows native executables without any Unix or POSIX compatibility layer. See the links section below for more information. Either option can generate windows-native executables and option 1 can provide a Unix-like POSIX portability layer that is reliant on a GPLed library. See the later sections for detailed information about using one of these configurations. LINKS The following links may be of use: 1. Main Cygwin homepage: http://www.cygwin.com/ 2. Main Mingw homepage: http://www.mingw.org/ In particular look for the MinGW FAQ at this link for a lot of useful Mingw-native development documentation. 3. Check out the FLTK newsgroups at the FLTK homepage: http://www.fltk.org/ Its archival search facilities are EXTREMELY useful to check back through previous problems with this sort of configuration before posting new questions. 4. Carl Thompson (member of the core team responsible for FLTK): http://www.carlthompson.net/ A pre-bundled development toolset tailored for use with an earlier version of FLTK may be found at: http://www.carlthompson.net/cygwin/ However, this has not been actively maintained since the Cygwin and MinGW offerings are now more complete these days. 5. GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compiler homepage: http://gcc.gnu.org/ 6. OpenGL page - for OpenGL and GLUT libs http://www.opengl.org/ BUILDING FLTK WITH CYGWIN OR MINGW Please read chapter 1 of the FLTK Programmers Manual for compilation instructions. WHY DOES A CONSOLE WINDOW APPEAR WHEN I RUN MY PROGRAM Windows has a flag that determines whether an application runs in the foreground with a console or in the background without a console. Use the "-mwindows" option to make your application run in the background and "-mconsole" to run in the foreground. Keep in mind that a windows application cannot send output to stdout, even if you run it from an existing console application. (Note: A special case of this exists if running a MinGW application from the command line of an MSYS shell, when an application is able to write to stdout, even if compiled with "-mwindows". The same applies to Cygwin.) HOW DO I GET OPENGL TO WORK? Both builds should automatically support OpenGL. The configuration file config.h has a number of settings which control compile-time compilation. One such setting is "HAVE_GL". This may be set to 0 to disable Open GL operation. Changing the line in config.h to #define HAVE_GL 1 will change this to compile and link in OpenGL.