What is the best way to build open source libraries DLLs for Windows developers to use?

Question

I have several C free software/open source libraries that I develop on Linux and OSX with the GNU toolchain (automake, conf, flex, bison, gcc, ...) but I occasionally get requests to provide Windows DLLs. I'd like to be able to provide those without having to spend a lot of time and money with Windows Visual Studio development. I do have a Windows XP virtual machine available and I also know the software is portable as occasionally I get patches to make it build in on windows.

What approaches or tools should I be using? Cross compiling on Linux? using Visual Studio Express or something else? I would prefer something that is fully automated from a SVN repository. I do not count cygwin as a solution since that does not seem to provide what Windows developers need, as far I understand the issues - linking and DLLs.

Answer 1

You could use MinGW or install the MSVC command line tools from Visual Studio Express.

Either of those can be driven by command line scripts.

I imagine a cross compile from Linux would also work, but I have no idea how easy (or painful) that might be to get going.

This short article shows a simple cross compile of a Windows application & running that app under Wine:

• http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005753

Answer 2

You can try Mingw with MSYS, Visual Studio (Express) with SUA (subsystem for unix application) or Cygwin to compile programs that are automake/autoconf based (./configure && make to build under linux).

Unfortunately usually the lib file they create is not compatible with other compilers, so if you want your library to work with an application that is developed using Visual Studio, then you should use the VSC++ approach. Usually a lot of GNU projects (check gnuwin32) actually have VC compatible build scripts too, than can be compiled using "nmake"

Answer 3

The Windows Software Development Kit includes Microsoft's C/C++ compiler (command line only with no visual tools), so you don't even need Visual C++ Express Edition. The Windows SDK is a free download from Microsoft.

Answer 4

If you're using http://www.cmake.org/, cmake can create the Makefile (for Unix) and project file (for Visual Studio). This is what for example the KDE project is using.

Visual Studio's compiler can be started from a Windows command line with 'devenv /build debug project.csproj' on the cmake generated file. This does however require a Windows (possibly in a VM) with a (potentialy free) Visual Studio installed.