Port GNU C++ programs to Visual C++

Question

How do you port C++ programs with makefile made from GNU C++ in Linux to Visual C++?

Answer 1

I don't know about an easy way to simply convert from one to another, but..

Assuming you use only ANSI C/C++ features, usually you don't need to convert the makefile, just look which .c/.cpp files are in it and add them to the VS project; you'll also have to check about compiler options and defined macros, to put them inside the VS project. I've done this to compile libs like expat, freetype, agg and others, without problems.

Answer 2

One thing I can suggest is to use CMake. If you implement your build system with CMake to auto-generate the makefiles for GCC on Linux, it takes only minor modifications to auto-generate projects and solutions for VC++.

Of course, this means learning a whole new build tool, so it may not be for you. It's only a suggestion.

Answer 3

Porting the build system: You could use a Windows port of GNU make, and change the makefile to invoke the Visual C++ command line tools (cl.exe, link.exe, lib.exe, etc.) when building on Windows and the GNU compiler tools when building on Linux. The difficulty of this approach depends on the complexity of the makefiles.

Porting the code: This depends on what APIs and libraries you are using, and what compiler warnings/errors/quirks you will encounter. For a more specific answer, ask a more specific question.

Answer 4

CMake was mentioned. I have used CMake and successfully compiled the resulting Visual Studio project. I found the CMake documentation very unhelpful -- I had to ask an existing user -- and the official manual (which costs money) was out of print at the time. Further, the Visual Studio project it produced was very rigidly formatted according the template preferred by whoever wrote the converter. I was unable to figure out how to customize project options or group source files.

I regularly cross-compile on Visual Studio and G++. For the most part, you just need to add all of the source files and header files into a Visual Studio project ('Add Existing Files', and add your entire source tree) and then compile it. Usually you'll get errors, so you start fixing bugs from there. If you used platform-specific libraries, you may be stuck porting to an alternative or removing features.

One further word of caution: Visual Studio and G++ have different compiler quirks. For the most part, they both conform excellently to the C++ standard, but slightly off-standard code which works in one may not work in the other. I have found this to be particularly true when dealing with templates, with Visual Studio being bizarrely permissive of syntax errors in many cases.