Difference between revisions of "Compiling wxWidgets with MinGW"

Revision as of 08:58, 19 July 2011

Platform	wxWidgets	MinGW
This article applies to the following versions
Windows XP	2.8.11	5.1.4
Windows 7	2.9.1	5.1.4
Status: Up to Date

Related Articles
Using Makefiles to compile wxWidgets

Install MinGW

Please follow the steps described in Installing MinGW under Windows.

Download and Install wxWidgets

See Downloading and installing wxWidgets.

Build the library

Open the command prompt (Start > Run... > cmd). Change the directory to the build\msw folder. For example:

CD wx\\wx288\\build\\msw

Clean up the source:

mingw32-make -f makefile.gcc MONOLITHIC=1 SHARED=1 UNICODE=1 BUILD=release clean

Then, compile the library:

mingw32-make -f makefile.gcc MONOLITHIC=1 SHARED=1 UNICODE=1 BUILD=release

Note: For more information on the UNICODE and BUILD options, see WxWidgets Build Configurations.

Build Output

In the example above a DLL was created under \lib\gcc_dll. The resultant setup.h file can be found under \lib\gcc_dll\mswu\wx

NOTE:

Executables created with can be rather BIG. In case you compile in DEBUG mode, the files become VERY BIG (>20 MB wxWidgets Minimal sample). With strip you can reduce the size, but it will always remain bigger than executables created with Visual Studio. In addition to that, Visual Studio seems to compile faster but I am not sure about this.

Troubleshooting

CreateProcess, The system cannot find the file specified.

if you get errors like this:

if not exist gcc_mswu mkdir gcc_mswu
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, -c "if not exist gcc_mswu mkdir gcc_mswu", ...) failed.
make (e=2): The system cannot find the file specified.
mingw32-make: [gcc_mswu] Error 2 (ignored)
if not exist ..\..\lib\gcc_lib mkdir ..\..\lib\gcc_lib
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, -c "if not exist ..\..\lib\gcc_lib mkdir ..\..\lib\gcc_lib", ...) failed.
make (e=2): The system cannot find the file specified.
mingw32-make: *** [..\..\lib\gcc_lib] Error 2

it's probably because you have MSYS installed and the MSYS\bin folder in your PATH, and this confuses mingw32-make. Remove the MSYS\bin folder from your PATH and try again, it should work. (Alternatively, use MSYS to build wxWidgets, as described in build\msw\install.txt in the wxWidgets source tree).

Note: MSYS\bin turns in to /bin, if you look from MinGW shell.

If you don`t have MSYS, edit your PATh=H environment variable and make sure your PATH points to the bin directory of your mingw installation.

Memory Exhausted (bin/ld.exe: out of memory allocating N bytes)

If you get "memory exhausted" errors, this is due to a Mingw bug. Use tdm-mingw instead : http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/ This applies to MinGW with installers 20110316 and 20110530 at least.

I'm not sure what the best practise is, but I edited my /etc/profile to put the TDM gcc first in PATH. Also, make sure you clean up the last build!

References:

ld returned 5 exit status

You most likely got this after experiencing the error above and switching to TDM gcc and trying the build again. This seems to be related to the leftover remnants from your previous build. (mingw32-make -f makefile.gcc seems insufficient to clean this).

Try building from a fresh wxWidgets source tree

undefined reference

While compiling your projects, you might get some "undefined reference" errors. In my case this was due to a wrong order in the g++ call : your static libs MUST be given before shared libs.

This might not work (please note the respective positions of "-lwx_mswXXXXXX" and "XXXXXXXXXXX/libXXXXXX.a") :

g++ -Wall -g -fexceptions -Wall -g -fexceptions -I/usr/local/lib/wx/include/msw-ansi-release-2.6 \
-I/usr/local/include/wx-2.6 -D__WXMSW__ -DWXUSINGDLL=1 -DNO_GCC_PRAGMA -o xpe.exe -Wl,--subsystem \
-Wl,windows -mwindows xpe.o xpemw.o  -L/usr/local/lib -mthreads -lwx_msw_xrc-2.6 -lwx_msw_qa-2.6 \
-lwx_msw_html-2.6 -lwx_msw_adv-2.6 -lwx_msw_core-2.6 -lwx_base_xml-2.6 -lwx_base_net-2.6 \
-lwx_base-2.6 ../src/components/codeeditor/libcodeeditor.a ../src/lib/liblogging.a ../src/lib/libstring.a
../src/components/codeeditor/libcodeeditor.a(tcodeeditor.o)(.text+0x169): In function `ZN11TCodeEditorC2EP8wxWindowiRK8wxString': C:/GNU/msys/1.0/home/Administrateur/xpe_project/src/components/codeeditor/tcodeeditor.cpp:45: undefined reference to `_imp__wxDefaultSize'
../src/components/codeeditor/libcodeeditor.a(tcodeeditor.o)(.text+0x2f4): C:/GNU/msys/1.0/home/Administrateur/xpe_project/src/components/codeeditor/tcodeeditor.c                                                        pp:46: undefined reference to `_imp___ZN22wxSystemSettingsNative9GetColourE14wxS

This correction should make it working (please note the respective positions of "-lwx_mswXXXXXX" and "XXXXXXXXXXX/libXXXXXX.a"):

g++ -Wall -g -fexceptions -Wall -g -fexceptions -I/usr/local/lib/wx/include/msw-ansi-release-2.6 \
-I/usr/local/include/wx-2.6 -D__WXMSW__ -DWXUSINGDLL=1 -DNO_GCC_PRAGMA -o xpe.exe -Wl,--subsystem \
-Wl,windows -mwindows xpe.o xpemw.o  ../src/components/codeeditor/libcodeeditor.a ../src/lib/liblogging.a \
../src/lib/libstring.a -L/usr/local/lib -mthreads -lwx_msw_xrc-2.6 -lwx_msw_qa-2.6 -lwx_msw_html-2.6 \
-lwx_msw_adv-2.6 -lwx_msw_core-2.6 -lwx_base_xml-2.6 -lwx_base_net-2.6 -lwx_base-2.6

Winavr interference

In some cases, actually everything is fine, but you might have more than one similar complier installed on your machine.

For a real example, I have C:\WinAVR-20100110\bin;C:\WinAVR-20100110\utils\bin; installed on my machine for some microcontroller firmware development.

The installed WinAVR containing a series GNU compiler like gcc, g++ , etc.

As the WinAVR tool chain is also registered to the window via PATH environment variable.So same kind of error as aboved occurs when I tried to compile wxWidgets-2.8.11.

This could be solved by temporary remove the related Winavr directory locaiton from PATH environment variable.(Not only your current user environment variable also the Global environment variable set by administrator)