1 INTRODUCTION 2 HOW TO BUILD FLTK USING MinGW/Cygwin 2.1 The Tools 2.2 Recommended Command Line Build Environment 2.3 Prerequisites 2.4 Downloading and Unpacking 2.5 Configuring FLTK 2.6 Building FLTK 2.7 Testing FLTK 2.8 Installing FLTK 2.9 Creating new Projects 3 HOW TO BUILD FLTK USING VISUAL STUDIO 2008 3.1 Prerequisites 3.2 Downloading and Unpacking 3.3 Configuring FLTK 3.4 Building FLTK 3.5 Testing FLTK 3.6 Installing FLTK 3.7 Creating new Projects 4 HOW TO BUILD FLTK USING VISUAL STUDIO 2010 4.1 Prerequisites 4.2 Downloading and Unpacking 4.3 Configuring FLTK 4.4 Building FLTK 4.5 Testing FLTK 4.6 Installing FLTK 4.7 Creating new Projects 5 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 7 LINKS 6 DOCUMENT HISTORY
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.
CAUTION: Libraries built by any one of these environments can not be mixed with object files from any other environment!
This chapter 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.
An alternative is to install the new (since about Oct. 2010) mingw cross tools that support newer gcc compilers for building native Windows applications (like -mno-cygwin above). Currently you would have to install mingw64-i686-gcc-g++ for 32-bit Windows applications (despite its name!), and/or mingw64-x86_64-gcc-g++ for 64-bit applications. You may also need to install the corresponding '-headers' packages as well. Currently these tools support gcc 4.5.x or newer, but the setup for FLTK is somewhat more complicated and not yet completely supported automatically (you may need to edit some lines in the generated makeinclude file).
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.
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. This is the recommended
one if you want to build native Windows programs only.
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.
In order to build FLTK from the command line, you need to install the MinGW environment from www.mingw.org. The graphical installer "mingw-get-inst" can be downloaded here for free:
http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started
Launch the installer and follow the instructions. In the "Select Components" dialog, add "C++ Compiler", "MSYS Basic System", and "MinGW Developer Toolkit". Wait for the installer to finish.
After downloading and installing, you need to launch the MinGW Shell through the Start menu.
Download FLTK from here:
http://www.fltk.org/software.php
into your home folder. The default location as seen from MSWindows is similar to
C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\home\matt\
If you are familiar with "subversion" and like to stay current with your version, you will find the subversion access parameters at the bottom of that page. Unpack FLTK into a convenient location. I like to have everything in my dev directory:
cd mkdir dev cd dev tar xvfz fltk-1.3.xxxx.tar.gz cd fltk-1.3.xxxx
If you got FLTK via subversion then you need one extra step. Otherwise skip over this part. Stay in your FLTK source-code directory and type the following:
NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh
Now configure your FLTK installation:
./configure
ADVANCED: type "./configure --help" to get a complete list of optional configuration parameters. These should be pretty self-explanatory. Some more details can be found in README. :END_ADVANCED
The configuration script will check your machine for the required resources which should all have been part of your MinGW installation. Review the Configuration Summary, maybe take some notes.
ADVANCED: some versions of MinGW/Msys are broken and complain about a missing --enable-auto-import. The solution is to upgrade to the current release. If that is not possible, you can include the --enable-auto-import flag when linking: ./configure LDFLAGS=-Wl,--enable-auto-import :END_ADVANCED
Known Problems:
There is a known incompatibility with some Windows subversion tools that may not set the correct line endings for autoconf. If you get strange error messages when running ./configure or make, you may need to convert configh.in to "Unix line endings" (LF-only). These error messages are unspecific, e.g. compilation errors like:
error: 'U32' does not name a type
error: 'bmibuffer' was not declared in this scope
You can fix the line endings with the MinGW/msys tool 'unix2dos' (u2d) or with your favorite editor, if it allows to change the line endings, then run autoconf and ./configure again. For further information see this bug report: http://www.fltk.org/newsgroups.php?gfltk.bugs+v:10197
Now this is easy. Stay in your FLTK source-code directory and type:
make
The entire FLTK toolkit including many test programs will be built for you. No warnings should appear.
(actually, as of Oct 25 2010, quite a lot of warnings related to suggested parentheses and others will appear, this is normal and will be fixed. The linker will also spit out a bunch of warnings for every program linked. This needs to be fixed. Lastly, there is no generator for man pages in a default MinGW installation, but you can install man and groff to fix this.)
After a successful build, you can test FLTK's capabilities:
test/demo
If you did not change any of the configuration settings, FLTK will be installed in "/usr/local/include" and "/usr/local/lib" by typing
make install
It is possible to install FLTK in user space by changing the installation path to a location within the user account by adding the "--prefix=PREFIX" parameter to the "./configure" command.
FLTK provides a neat script named "fltk-config" that can provide all the flags needed to build FLTK applications using the same flags that were used to build the library itself. Running "fltk-config" without arguments will print a list of options. The easiest call to compile an FLTK application from a single source file is:
fltk-config --compile myProgram.cxx
"fltk-config" and "fluid" will be installed in "/usr/local/bin/" by default. I recommend that you add it to the command search path.
In order to build FLTK from within VisualStudio 2008, you need to install the VisualC developer environment from the Microsoft web site. The Express edition is free of charge and sufficient to develop FLTK applications:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/
You must make sure that at least VisualStudio 2008 Service Pack 1 is installed or building FLTK on a multicore CPU will be very painful!
Download FLTK from here:
http://www.fltk.org/software.php
If you are familiar with "subversion" and like to stay current with your version, you will find the subversion access parameters at the bottom of that page.
Unpack FLTK by using an appropriate unpacker and copy the new folder into a convenient location. I have set up a "dev" folder in my home folder for all my projects.
Launch VisualStudio. Open the project file in
...\fltk-1.3.xxxx\ide\VisualC2008\fltk.sln
Choose "Debug" or "Release" mode from the "Solution Configurations" menu.
Use the context menu of the "demo" project to "Set as StartUp Project". Then select "Build Solution" from the "Build" menu or press F7 to build all libraries.
VisualC 2008 has a bug that messes up building a Solution on multicore CPUs. Make sure that Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is installed or, as a workaround, set the "maximum number of parallel project builds" to 1 (Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > Build and Run > maximum number of parallel project builds). Also, repeating the build command two or three times may clear unresolved reference errors.
Select "Start Debugging" from the "Debug" menu or just press F5 to run the Demo program. Use "Demo" to explore all test programs.
The default location for VisualC 2008 libraries and headers is here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\
It is possible to move the FLTK libraries, headers, and Fluid into the respective subdirectories, so that they are available for future development without adding link and include paths to the solution.
copy the entire FL directory into the include path
copy all .lib files from the fltk lib directory to the VC lib directory
copy fluid.exe in the fluid directory to the bin directory
I highly discourage using dll's (dynamically linking libraries) on MSWindows because they will require an installation process and likely cause version conflicts. Use the static .lib libraries instead.
This chapter assumes that libraries and headers are copied into
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\
Create a new project of type "General", "Empty Project" and add a simple "C++" file to it. The FLTK "hello" source code is a good base.
Now open the Project Properties dialog and add "Comctl32.lib" and all the FLTK libraries that you want to use (at least "fltk.lib") to Additional Dependencies (Configuration Properties > Linker > Additional Dependencies). In the same dialog, add "WIN32" to the C++ Preprocessor Definitions (Configuration Properties > C/C++ > Preprocessor > Preprocessor Definitions).
Compile and run your test program with F5.
You can also include .fl resources: add a new Header file to your project, but let the name end in .fl. Right-click and select "Open with...". Add "fluid.exe" from the "bin" directory and set it as the default editor.
To automatically compile .fl files, open the Properties editor and set the Custom Build Steps to:
Command Line: fluid.exe -c $(InputPath) Description: Compiling Fluid .fl file Outputs: $(InputDir)$(InputName).cxx; $(InputDir)$(InputName).h
Now add the generated .cxx file to your project as well. Whenever the .fl file is changed, the corresponding .cxx file will be recompiled.
In order to build FLTK from within VisualStudio 2010, you need to install the VisualC developer environment from the Microsoft web site. The Express edition is free of charge and sufficient to develop FLTK applications:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/
Download FLTK from here:
http://www.fltk.org/software.php
If you are familiar with "subversion" and like to stay current with your version, you will find the subversion access parameters at the bottom of that page.
Unpack FLTK by using an appropriate unpacker and copy the new folder into a convenient location. I have set up a "dev" folder in my home folder for all my projects.
Launch VisualStudio. Open the project file in
.../fltk-1.3.xxxx/ide/VisualC2010/fltk.sln
Choose "Debug" or "Release" mode from the "Solution Configurations" menu.
Use the context menu of the "demo" project to "Set as StartUp Project". Then select "Build Solution" from the "Build" menu or press F7 to build all libraries.
Select "Start Debugging" from the "Debug" menu or just press F5 to run the Demo program. Use "Demo" to explore all test programs.
The default location for VisualC 2010 libraries and headers is here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\
It is possible to move the FLTK libraries, headers, and Fluid into the respective subdirectories, so that they are available for future development without adding link and include paths to the solution.
copy the entire FL directory into the include path
copy all .lib files from the fltk lib directory to the VC lib directory
copy fluid.exe in the fluid directory to the bin directory
I highly discourage using dll's (dynamically linking libraries) on MSWindows because they will require an installation process and likely cause version conflicts. Use the static .lib libraries instead.
This chapter assumes that libraries and headers are copied into
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\
Create a new project of type "General", "Empty Project" and add a simple "C++" file to it. The FLTK "hello" source code is a good base.
Now open the Project Properties dialog and add "Comctl32.lib" and all the FLTK libraries that you want to use (at least "fltk.lib") to Additional Dependencies (Configuration Properties > Linker > Additional Dependencies). In the same dialog, add "WIN32" to the C++ Preprocessor Definitions (Configuration Properties > C/C++ > Preprocessor > Preprocessor Definitions).
Compile and run your test program with F5.
You can also include .fl resources: add a new Header file to your project, but let the name end in .fl. Right-click and select "Open with...". Add "fluid.exe" from the "bin" directory and set it as the default editor.
To automatically compile .fl files, open the Properties editor and change the Element Type to Custom Build and click Apply. Now set the Custom Build Steps to:
Command Line: fluid.exe -c %(FullPath) Description: Compiling Fluid .fl file Outputs: $(InputDir)$(InputName).cxx; $(InputDir)$(InputName).h
Now add the generated .cxx file to your project as well. Whenever the .fl file is changed, the corresponding .cxx file will be recompiled.
Windows has a flag that determines whether an application runs in the foreground with a console or in the background without a console.
If you're using gcc (i.e. MinGW or Cygwin), then use the linker option "-mwindows" to make your application run in the background and "-mconsole" to run in the foreground. Use fltk-config --ldflags to see appropriate linker flags, or use fltk-config --compile to compile a single source file.
If you're using MS VC++, then you must set the linker option "/subsystem:windows" to create a "Windows" program (w/o console window), or set the linker option "/subsystem:console" for a console program, i.e. with a console window. These options are set differently in the FLTK project files, depending on whether you select a "Debug" or "Release" build.
Other compilers and build systems may have different options.
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.)
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.
The following links may be of use:
Main Cygwin homepage:
http://www.cygwin.com/
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.
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.
GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compiler homepage:
http://gcc.gnu.org/
OpenGL page - for OpenGL and GLUT libs
http://www.opengl.org/
Oct 25 2010 - matt: restructured entire document and verified instructions Dec 20 2010 - matt: merged with README.win32 Dec 22 2010 - AlbrechtS: added newer Cygwin (cross/mingw-w64) options Feb 24 2012 - AlbrechtS: clarified console window FAQ
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