Building Libraries on Windows

Hobbyist and newbie, so no laughing ;)

I have been developing some toy programs on my Mac for a long time and everything is n开发者_运维技巧ice and straightforward.

I was trying to port one of my existing projects to Windows (as a way to get started in developing for Windows) but am stuck trying to build the libraries I have come to love in a Unix environment under Windows (and MinGW).

At the risk of revealing my naïvety, could someone just run through how to build and install a library on Windows (including any special software required)?

For example, an install readme might look like this:

Do this to install:
./configure
make
make install

Obviously on Windows that pukes...so what are the analogous steps on Windows?

You have a couple of options wrt building unix style libraries on windows:

• Google for a pre-built binary distribution made for windows of the library in question.

• If the libraries authors have bothered to support it, you can try installing Cygwin to get a posix like build environment on windows

• Some libraries - like OpenSSL - have a set of build instructions for windows that include installing ActiveState Perl, and then running the appropriate configure script manually.

• Where the authors of the library have made no special effort, you are pretty stuck: Create a static library project in the dev environment, add the libraries files to it, create (or move) the headers that the ./configure step usually creates or moves and build it yourself.

It is a tragic state of affairs that doing this "simple" task is so hard. Developers seem to take one of two lessons away from this:

• Microsoft is the devil. Microsoft hates developers. Hates open source software. And is #@#$. Compiling libraries and software from source via a standardized ./configure & make install process is the one true way.

• Microsoft is the one true way. The microsoft eco system of pre-built .lib files and headers is perfection and people who build everything from source using arcane perl scripts and install into a standardized filesystem are mentally defective.

Your pick :P