Cross compile GTK+ application from Linux to Windows?

How can I cross compile my GTK+ app (written in C) from Linux to Windows?开发者_JAVA百科 Could I just replace the "gcc" command with "mingw32"?

Fedora has a great mingw32 cross-compiler toolchain which comes with lots of precompiled libraries, including GTK+ and gtkmm. For most applications you just need to install the cross-compiler and the cross-compiled GTK+ libraries: yum install mingw32-gcc mingw32-gtk2

Once everything needed is installed, compiling your application is just the matter of running "mingw32-configure" followed with "make".

More information at the project page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW

You can use mingw-cross-env - all you have to do then is to change your CC/CXX environment path to use the i686-mingw32- prefix and export the mingw-cross-env bin dirs (both) to your PATH variable (or if you are using autotool it's even easier) - see the documentation on the homepage.

There is actually a project called MXE that does exactly this.

Pre-build package

You can download my pre-build binaries if you want.

Build from source

You can also build the code from scratch ideally also applying this PR to update to the latest GTK 3.24 version.

MXE has a easy wrapper (x86_64-w64-mingw32.static-cmake) to cross-build your project towards Windows, while using Linux. Allowing to evenly statically build your project into a single .exe file! Of course shared builds (x86_64-w64-mingw32.shared-cmake) are also supported. The example wrapper scripts are meant for CMake based projects.

Before you can build your project with MXE, you need to build the GTK3 from source-code. (There are some Linux packages available, but mostly out-dated). If you are using C++, you can also build gtkmm3. Since you are in place C, you only need to build gtk3.

1. git clone https://github.com/mxe/mxe.git
2. Become root user: su
3. mv mxe /opt/mxe
4. cd /opt/mxe
5. Build the MXE project yourself:

For static builds under Windows 64-bit for GTK3 & Gtkmm3:

sudo make gtk3 gtkmm3 -j 16 MXE_TARGETS='x86_64-w64-mingw32.static' MXE_PLUGIN_DIRS='plugins/gcc12'

For shared build to Windows 64-bit (again GTK3 + Gtkmm3):

sudo make gtk3 gtkmm3 -j 16 MXE_TARGETS='x86_64-w64-mingw32.shared' MXE_PLUGIN_DIRS='plugins/gcc12'

More info see the tutorial steps on MXE.cc.

Once you done the cross-compile environment / MXE build. Now you can use the CMake wrapper scripts I mentioned earlier. Those scripts are located in the /opt/mxe/usr/bin/ directory.

The scripts (like x86_64-w64-mingw32.static-cmake) can now be used to compile your project towards Windows, while using the Linux operating system. The build result would be an Windows .exe.

Disclaimer: I personally created this PR for MXE to update GTK to the latest 3.24.x release.