Getting started with GLFW (part 2)

This will be a relative small part though I was surprised to find I took the hard way in doing this.
I'm going to walk through the steps for getting our sample library to compile on Windows.

Obviously you need a compiler, I've had Visual Studio 2010 Express installed on my laptop for awhile now so that is what I'm going to stick with. I am however going to compile this using makefiles and using the static libraries. A better way forward probably is to just create a solution in Visual Studio and let it take care of the difficult stuff, you simply start with an empty console project and work from there.

One thing that is nice is that for Windows you can download all the libraries precompiled and save you a bunch of hassle, no need to go through CMake and compile the source code yourself. Off course if you feel inclined to do so, or wish to use the latest source out of github, you have no choice.

The binaries come as dynamic and static libraries. I'm going for static but if you rather use the dynamic libraries simply link in glfw3dll.lib and copy the dll in place instead of using glfw3.lib. Also the makefile becomes a little simpler as you need to include less standard static libraries.

I was surprised to find that the static library was compiled with /MD instead of /MT and that caused a bit of a hassle.
The other thing is that the last time I've worked with makefiles for nmake was years ago and I struggled with the syntax for a bit. A lot of the stuff I'm doing in the makefile on the Mac didn't want to work.
While the makefile for Mac OS X I probably won't need to touch anymore (except maybe for resources) I'll be editing the makefile on Windows each time I add files. If I find how to do this better, I'll revisit this post.

The other thing that is important to know when using makefiles, and thus compiling on the command line, is that the environment is not setup by default. VC does come with a handy batch file you can run that does all the work for you. I've got a batch file init.bat in my home folder so all I need to remember after opening my command prompt is to type in init:

call "c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\vc\vcvarsall.bat" x86
cd Development

So lets first look at our new folder structure with our new windows files in place:

3rdparty
  - GLFW
    - glfw3.h
    - libglfw3_mac.a
    - glfw3.lib
build
include
macosx
  - Info.plist
  - makefile
resources
  - app.icns
source
  - main.c
windows
  - makefile

Pretty straight forward, just the windows glfw library and the makefile in our windows folder that have been added.
The contents of the Windows makefile is as follows:

# Compiler directives for Windows
CFLAGS = /c /WX /MD /nologo /D "WIN32" /I..\include /I..\3rdparty
LDFLAGS = /nologo /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /ENTRY:mainCRTStartup /WX 
WINLIBS = opengl32.lib kernel32.lib user32.lib gdi32.lib comdlg32.lib advapi32.lib shell32.lib uuid.lib 

APPNAME = glfw-tutorial.exe
OBJECTDIR = ..\build\Objects
CONTENTSDIR = ..\build

OBJECTS = $(OBJECTDIR)\main.obj

all: $(CONTENTSDIR) \
  $(OBJECTDIR) \
  $(CONTENTSDIR)\$(APPNAME) \
 
$(CONTENTSDIR): 
  mkdir $(CONTENTSDIR) 

$(OBJECTDIR):
  mkdir $(OBJECTDIR)
  
$(CONTENTSDIR)\$(APPNAME): $(OBJECTS) ..\3rdparty\GLFW\glfw3.lib 
  link $(LDFLAGS) /out:$@ $** $(WINLIBS)

$(OBJECTDIR)\main.obj:
  cl $(CFLAGS) /Fo$@ ..\source\main.c

clean:
  rmdir ..\build /s /q

Now in your command line window cd into the windows subfolder and type nmake

This time our result is a simple exe file.

What's next?

As mentioned in part 1, now that we've got our basic example working it is time to make it work using OpenGL 3.