How to add 3rd party libraries to MinGW?

Question

I've just set up MinGW environment following this post

But how to add 3rd party libraries to it?

Answer 1

No different from any other system using gcc

• get the sources
• untar
• run configure -- this may require a tweak or two
• make
• make install

and now use your new library with proper -Lfoo/bar -lfoobar switches.

I recommend the MSys system around MinGW in order to do all this.

Answer 2

A library consists of two main components - the C header files and the compiled object code archive. GCC has a bewildering array of ways of specifying these things, but let's say you are using a library foo.a which lives in the relative directory path foo/lib, and a header foo.h which lives in foo/inc. Your own C code lives in main.c and looks like this:

#include "foo.h"
int main() {
  return FooFunc();    // call function in foo.a
}

To compile this, you could use the command line:

gcc main.c -Ifoo/inc foo/lib/foo.a -o main.exe

the -I flag adds to the path searched for headers. You can also add to the lib path, but then things start to get complicated :-)