That sounds a stupid question, but I'm really curious about how to compile a DLL without using Visual Studio since I'm using Unity3D OS X for now. Is there some way like "tool chain" can do the trick?
Any solution is appreciated except Ask your friend/colleague to compile it for you or buy another computer/install windows/using remote control.
Build a cross tool chain of Mingw. However, be aware that you can not link C++ libraries between compilers, or often even compiler versions. Only DLLs with a C calling interface will work. (They can internally use C++ but must expose a C API.)
Or you could try running Visual Studio in Wine. VS2010 has bronze support in Wine, i.e. the compiler works.
Related
I am creating a very large project (a few thousand lines) and so would rather not use Notepad++. An IDE would make it so much easier. I have experience with Microsoft Visual Studio and love it. Is there some easy way to use Cygwin's GCC from within Microsoft Visual Studio?
Alternately, are there any other good Windows IDEs for GCC besides NetBeans and Eclipse? (I hate both of them with a passion.)
There are several ways to go here:
Option 1: Create a Custom Build Tool
Visual Studio 2005 and newer will let you register custom build tools. They tell the IDE how to transform files of one form (e.g. a .cpp file) into another form (e.g. an .obj file).
So far as I know, no one has done this yet for GCC. And, doing it yourself requires writing COM code, which is probably too deep a pool to dive into just for a single project. You'd have to have a compelling reason to take this project on.
You then have to manually adjust each project to tell it to use the custom build tool instead of the default, since you're using a file name extension (.cpp, probably) that Visual C++ already knows about. You'll run into trouble if you try to mix the VC++ and g++ compilers for a single executable built from multiple modules.
On the plus side, if you were looking to start an open source project, this sounds like a good one to me. I expect you'd quickly gather a big user base.
Option 2: Makefile Project
Start Visual Studio and say File > New Project.
In the Visual C++ section, select Makefile Project
Fill out the Makefile Project Wizard:
Build command line: make
Clean commands: make clean
Rebuild command line: make clean all
You can leave the Output (for debugging) field alone if you've named your executable after the project name and it lands where Visual Studio expects to find it.
Leave the rest of the fields alone unless you know what they are and why you want to change them. As an example, you might choose to pass a -D flag on the Preprocessor definitions line to get separate debug and release outputs. If you know you want this, you know how to set it up, so I'm not going to make this long answer even longer in order to explain it.
You'll be asked the same set of questions for the Release build. If you want to bother with separate debug and release builds, you'd make any changes here.
Having done all this, you still have to create the Makefile, and add a make.exe to your PATH. As with the debug vs. release question, going into that level of detail would push this answer off topic.
As ugly as this looks, it's still easier than creating custom build tools. Plus, you say you need to port to Unix eventually, so you're going to need that Makefile anyway.
Option 3: Cross-Platform Development
You say you want to port this program to Unix at some point, but that doesn't mean you must use GCC on Windows now. It is quite possible to write your program so that it builds under Visual C++ on Windows and GCC/Makefiles on *ix systems.
There are several tools that make this easier. One very popular option is CMake, which is available as an installation time option in newer versions of Visual Studio. There are many alternatives such as SCons and Bakefile.
Clang
You can use the Clang compiler with Visual Studio to target Android, iOS, and Windows.
If you are targeting Android, you can use the Clang/LLVM compiler that ships with the Android NDK and toolchain to build your project. Likewise, Visual Studio can use Clang running on a Mac to build projects targeting iOS. Support for Android and iOS is included in the “Mobile Development with C++” workload. For more information about targeting Android or iOS check out our posts tagged with the keywords “Android” and “iOS”.
If you are targeting Windows, you have a few options:
Use Clang/LLVM; “Clang for Windows” includes instructions to install Clang/LLVM as a platform toolset in Visual Studio.
Use Clang to target Windows with Clang/C2 (Clang frontend with Microsoft Code Generation).
GCC
If your project targets Linux or Android, you can consider using GCC. Visual Studio’s C++ Android development natively supports building your projects with the GCC that ships with the Android NDK, just like it does for Clang. You can also target Linux – either remotely or locally with the Windows Subsystem for Linux – with GCC.
Check out our post on Visual C++ for Linux Development for much more info about how to use Visual Studio to target Linux with GCC. If you are specifically interested in targeting WSL locally, check out Targeting WSL from Visual Studio.
Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/use-any-c-compiler-with-visual-studio/
I'm from the future.
I keep (poking at) a C/C++ toolchain using Visual Code on Win/Lin/Mac and MinGW installed from Choclatey.
(This was done for my sanity - install GDB and GCC however you want)
I've run it with GCC and GDB with IntelliSense using MS's own weird JSON makefiles.
Someday, someone (you?) will write a Gradle or Python script to generate these; for now the examples online in the docs seem to work.
It seems to require three types of JSON thing;
a single IntelliSense configuration for the whole workspace
a Debugging Configuration entry for each binary you want to debug
these can invoke the build tasks
a Build Task per-artifact
I don't think that there's a "require" or "dependency" thingie-mah-bob; sorry
My boss just asked me to integrate his bosses old Fortran code into a project (Java) I'm working on. The code was written in the 90s, so I imagine it'll still compile, so rather than re-write it, I'm hoping I can just call the functions from a .dll. I'm already calling some C .dlls, so I think I've got that part covered.
I've been doing some reading, and most of the articles talk about integrating the Intel Visual Fortran Compiler into Microsoft Visual Studio. We've got a university site license for Visual Studio, but it looks like the Intel Visual Fortran Compiler is in around the $700 range. I don't think my boss will go for that, so I'm looking for another option. I know Microsoft makes a lot of products freely available to students via Project Dreamspark, but I didn't see anything Fortran related.
I'm looking at some cygwin based options right now (g95, I think), but I'm looking for other ideas/options. Any ideas?
I've used the gfortran (g95) compiler with the -shared flag to create DLLs. first compile the .for/.f90 files with:
gfortran -c myfile1.f90
gfortran -c myfile2.f90
then:
gfortran -shared -o mydll.dll myfile1.o myfile2.o
MinGW will let you create a DLL that will work with your MS stuff.
Look for a GCC port to Windows, such as Mingw or GCW. Both those will create .obj files which can be linked to in Visual Studio. Or you could futz around and configure VS to invoke one of those command line compilers into the project. But since the code is relatively static, it might be a nice compile once and forget it task, hopefully.
Don't expect much help from Microsoft on Fortran.
They spent years trying to kill it off in favour of Visual Basic / C.
You could try Silverfrost's compiler.
http://www.silverfrost.com/11/ftn95/ftn95_fortran_95_for_windows.aspx
This is available free ('personal edition' version) and works with Visual Studio.
It's basically a F90/F95 compiler with a selection of later features included.
You did not say if the old boss' code was written in F77 or F90.
But I think that Silverfrost will handle the old code with minimal changes.
If it turns out well for you, there's also an academic version and an enterprise edition to move up to as desired.
The requirements listed in the 3ds Max SDK state that plug-ins for 3ds Max 2011 must be built with Visual C++ 9.0 (Visual Studio 2008).
If I create a DLL with a different version of Visual C++, won't the binary be identical? Is this simply a matter of choosing the right compiler settings?
What problems will I run into if I try to build a plug-in using Visual C++ 2010 (Visual Studio 2010)?
I don't know specifically for 3ds Max, but the usual reason is the C Runtime library. If the host application uses the DLL version of the CRT, then plugins will also need to use the same version.
Otherwise, imagine the case where your plugin creates some memory using malloc(), and passes it to the host application, which uses it and then calls free(). If your plugin and the host application are using different CRTs, the host's call to free() will fail or crash because it wasn't the host's CRT that malloc()ed that block of memory.
The binary won't be identical but the binary interfaces should be, which is what you need.
The reason you can't use VS2010 is because it is not yet production quality. They think you should wait for VS2010 SP1 at a minimum.
You think they are just being obstinate and stubborn, eh? Ruining all your fun. They have reasons. Good ones.
Because of bugs like this:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/565959
I use both visual studio 2008 and 2010 for plugin development.
Only difference I've seen is that the user need the vs c++ runtime version for 2010\2008.
But there might be pitfalls - but I have not encountered any problems with it yet.
C++ doesn't have a standardised binary interface. The compiler "mangles" each symbol name (i.e. each function or static data) to include information about namespaces and signature, so that namespaces, argument overloading, &c. can work. Each compiler is free to decide how to do this. Different MSVS compiler versions do name mangling in different ways, so in general you can't link a C++ library compiled with 2005 and a library compiled with 2008 together: this includes loading a 2008 DLL from a 2005 executable (for example). You can do this if the interface between the libraries is C, as long as the relevant functions are marked with extern "C" to prevent name mangling. And in practice the differences are not always that great: for example, I never had trouble using VS2005 SP1 to compile a library for 3ds Max 9, which supposedly requires VS2005 with no service pack.
Microsoft is trying to fix this incompatibility, so in VS2010 they introduced an option, so VS2010 can produce binaries compatible with VS2005 programs or VS2008 programs (maybe some earlier versions too, I forget). If you have to create a plugin to work with multiple 3ds Max versions, and you don't get caught out by any VS2010 bugs, this is probably a good option. Also, the Intel C++ compiler has a mode where it produces binaries that are compatible with an MSVS version of your choice, which might be a better option for you if it's for hobby use or you can afford the slightly expensive price tag. (They achieve this by copying the way MSVS does name mangling.)
Assume I have source code for a lib/tool that works on gcc compiler. Can I use the same code and compile it in visual studio. will that be possible at all? If it is possible, how do I do it?
if you are just using all the standard C/C++ library like stdio.h, stdlib.h, etc. it should work fine. Pure console program should work fine. If you used some GUI related library (especially if you are porting over from unix to window) then it might not work.
To do so, you can simply just create a new project in visual studio and add the existing source code into the project workspace. Compile it, if you encounter any error, just post here or try solve if you know how
It depends on your code, GCC support a variant of C (C99) which Visual Studio doesn't support yet.
If your trying to compile a Unix program on Windows you best bet will be to use Cygwin.
Check this question for pointers on using Cygwin in Visual Studio.
Is it possible to switch off managed code (and switch on unmanaged code) for c++ coding, so that programs (exes) made are run direct to native machine code in Visual Studio 2008?
Also, is it true that after the first time a .net (managed) exe runs (say written in C#) the exe gets converted to a native code one (like the old c++ ones pre .net)? Or is there a way to make it compile direct to native code if it was written in C#?
The answer to both of these questions is yes.
You can create unmanaged c++ code projects in VS which do not need .Net. You can also link unmanaged C++ code to managed C++ code and (sort of) get the best of both worlds - although the matching of calling parameters between the to systems is interesting.
You can also use the ngen .Net utility to pre-compile .Net projects to pure code. However in doing so you loose some flexibility. The JIT compiler will take account of local capabilities when compiling a .Net project. So if you distribute a .Net project as generated by VS then ngen on the local machine that runs the program will do the compiliing. However if you use ngen on your machine the precompiled code will be tied to the processsor capabilities of your system.
As per Joel's comment. regardless of using ngen or not, you still need .Net framework on the target machine.
In thinking about it, the use of ngen to pre-compile a .Net project probably is no worse than compiling an unmanaged c++ project to native code.
To do what you want for C#, you would use ngen.exe, which comes with the C# compiler. You run that command on the image, and it gets added to the GAC as native code.
As far as i know, you can switch temporarily to unmanaged code, i.e. using unmanaged variables etc. by marshaling. Take a look here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/bb384865.aspx