Installing C/C++ libraries on Windows

Question

I'm studying (well, trying to) C right now, but I'm limited to working in Windows XP. I've managed to set up and learn how to use Emacs and can compile simple C programs with gcc (from Emacs no less!), but I'm getting to the point where I'd like to install something like SDL to play around with it.

The thing is that the installation instructions for SDL indicate that, on a Win32 environment using MingW, I would need to use MSYS to run ./configure and make/make install to install SDL, like one would do on Linux. I noticed that when I unzipped the SDL-dev package (forgot the exact name, sorry) there were folders there that corresponded to a folder in the MinGW directory (SDL/include -> MinGW/include).

Am I right in saying that all the ./configure and make commands do is move these files from one directory to another? Couldn't I just move those files by hand and spare myself the trouble of installing and configuring MSYS (which, to be honest, confuses me greatly)?

Answer 1

In most case, configure and make will discover the compiler/environment of your machine and build the suitable binary, respectively. Therefore, unfortunately, it will not be easy as moving/copying header files to new locations.

However, in some cases, the library can be the "header only" library. Which means you need only header files to use it.

I have no experience with MSYS and SDL. But the basics of configure and make is worth learning (especially if you are going to program any C/C++ in non-Windows environment.)

Answer 2

The build process usually works like this: the configure script finds the appropriate settings for the compilation (like which features to enable, the paths to the required libraries, which compiler to use etc.) and creates a Makefile accordingly. make then compiles the source code to binaries. make install copies the created binaries, the headers, and the other files that belong to the library to the appropriate places.

You can't just copy the files from the source archive, because the source archive does not contain the binary files (or any other files that are created during the make step), so all you'd copy would be the headers, which aren't enough to use the library.