Desktop Development Environment that Compiles to Linux, Mac OS, and Windows

Question

Hi, is there any development environments that allow you to have one code base that can compile to Linux, Mac OS, and Windows versions without much tweaking? I know this is like asking for where the Holy Grail is burred, but maybe such a thing exists. Thanks.

Answer 1

I've heard this is possible. You're compiler would need to support this. The only one that I know does is GCC but it obviously takes special configuration. I, however, have never used this feature. I've only seen that it exists.

What you are looking for is called "Cross Compiling"

Answer 2

Maybe something like CodeBlocks?

Answer 3

This is achieved through a number of mechanisms, the most prominent being build systems and specific versions of code for certain systems. What you do is write your code such that, if it requires an operating system API, it calls a specific function. By example, I might use MyThreadFunction(). Now, when I build under Linux I get a linux specific version of this MyThreadFunction() that calls pthread_create() whereas the windows version calls CreateThread(). The appropriate includes are also included in these specific platform-files.

The other thing to do is to use libraries that provide consistent interfaces across platforms. wxWidgets is one such platform for writing desktop apps, as is Qt and GTK+ for that matter. Any libraries you use it is worth trying to find a cross-platform implementation. Someone will undoubtedly mention Boost at some point here. The other system I know if is the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) that provides a whole array of things to allow httpd to run on Windows/Linux/Mac.

This way, your core code-base is platform-agnostic - your build system includes the system specific bits and your code base links them together.

Now, can you do this from one desktop? I know you can compile for Windows from Linux and so probably for Mac OS X from Linux, but I doubt if you can do it from Windows-Linux. In any case, you need to test what you've built on each platform so my advice would be to run virtual machines (see vmware/virtualbox).

Finally, editors/environments: use whatever suits you. I use either Eclipse/GVim on Linux and Visual Studio on Windows - VS is my "Windows build system".