README.win32

Building gtkmm on Win32
===========================

Currently, both the mingw (native win32) gcc compiler and MS Visual
Studio 2017 are supported. gtkmm can be built with mingw32-gcc using
the gnu autotools (automake, autoconf, libtool). As explicitly
stated in the gtk+ for win32 distribution (http://www.gimp.org/win32/),
the gcc compiler provided by the cygwin distribution should not be
used to build gtk+/gtkmm libraries and/or applications (see the
README.win32 that comes with the gtk+ DLLs). This MIGHT cause
conflicts between the cygwin and msvcrt runtime environments.

1. Mingw

The mingw distribution which has been tested with this release is the
following :

* MinGW-4.1 as the base distribution.

The bare mingw distribution does not provide the necessary tools (sh, perl, m4
, autoconf, automake, ..) to run the provided configure script "as is". One 
(currently non supported) solution is to use mingw in conjunction with msys,
which is readily available on the mingw website (http://www.mingw.org/).

The preferred method is to combine the cygwin distribution (for the unix tools
that were mentioned above) with mingw by making sure that the mingw
tools (gcc, ld, dlltool, ..) are called first.

First, make sure that you have working distribution of the native port
of both libsigc++-2.0.x and gtk+-2.0 on win32 (see
http://www.gimp.org/win32). If you can't compile a simple gtk+ example
using gcc and `pkg-config --cflags --libs`, you should not even think
about trying to compile gtkmm, let alone using precompiled libgtkmm
DLLs to port your gtkmm application !

The configure script can then be called using (as an example) the
following options

./configure --prefix=/target --build=i386-pc-mingw32 --disable-static

then

make
make check
make install

2. MS Visual Studio 2017

Use the Visual Studio command prompt that is appropriate for your build
configuration, and navigate to $(srcdir)\MSVC_NMake.  Run
'nmake /f Makefile.vc CFG=[debug|release] <options> to perform the build.
Please see MSVC_NMake\README for further info on the options.

Due to C++-17 requirements, previous versions of Visual Studio are not
supported.

3. Gtkmm methods and signals not available on win32

All gtkmm methods and signals are available on win32.

4. Gtkmm examples and demos on win32

All demos and examples compile/run on win32