跨平台开发？

Question

I am looking for a solution which would allow me to code for Linux and Windows using C++.

On Windows I use Visual Studio (I tried other stuff on Windows but I work with DirectX and as far as I know, it's the best solution).

On Linux I use NetBeans (which I like very much).

My problem is that I want the project be independent of Visual Studio and NetBeans.

For a while I thought that CMake was the solution, however the learning process is too important, I rather spend my time coding than learning all the tricks with CMake. So I settled for Boost.Jam . It worked fine on Linux but sucked with Visual Studio.

I created a small Hello World program, on Windows. I created a Visual Studio Makefile project and while it's compiling and linking correctly. I can run the executable but not from Visual Studio, which can't find the executable (no matter what I do). I can't debug either. Also I can't see the compilation error message when I get one. All I can see from Visual Studio is that there is a makefile action in progress and that there is a mistake about it (even though the program is created and run fine).

I've been browsing the Boost.Jam documentation for a while but let's face it, it's pretty poor (no wonder not a lot of people heard of it) or I'm pretty not suited for the job (meaning stupid lol but yet why so few heard of it).

I have three questions:

I'd like to know if somebody heard of a project which use Boost.Jam with visual studio? If yes can I have a look at it ?

Is there a tool out there with real Visual Studio integration?

How many people think that learning to use CMake (correctly) cost a lot of time? Any tricks to speed up?

Answer 1

You should take the time to learn CMake and to speed up the learning process buy/read "Mastering CMake 4th Edition"

If you have problems you should use the CMake mailing list , which is active (August 2009 had ~600 messages)

Answer 2

Qt and Qt Creator look like a good solution to your problem. qmake can generate vcproj files and native Linux makefiles.

Answer 3

如果要用Windows和Linux的C ++编写代码，则要用linux编写代码，并将应用程序与最小的cygwin设置捆绑在一起。

Answer 4

Are you sure you're looking at the right documentation? You have said "Boost.Jam", so chances are high you are looking at wrong thing. Please visit Boost.Build documentation

I am positively sure that many people used Boost.Build inside Visual Studio without problems. Can you try running the program on the command line -- maybe there's some error message that Visual Studio decides not to show?

Answer 5

I'd recommend CMake as well. It's a bit scary at first but you ease into it progressively. It's still rather easy for a beginner to write cross-platform scripts, even if they are not pretty or optimal as an expert would do. Integration with CppUnit (for unit tests) and Hudson (build mgt) made it possible to configure a Continuous Integration framework in no time.

Answer 6

I don't know much about NetBeans, but if you want to develop for both Windows and Linux and use Visual Studio on Windows, then CMake is the only sane choice , really. I've used it for several years now, and I cannot begin to guess how much time it has saved me maintaining makefiles and project files.

Answer 7

Upvote for Ben. We have a major vendor that did a Windows port of their old Unix code for commodity hardware access, and that's exactly what they did.

Emacs works fine on both platforms, as does GNU make. If you need a GUI, I'd use GTK+ with MinGW/msys rather than Cygnus and an X port.

Answer 8

I've seen a CMake demo at Fosdem a few months ago and it looked pretty impressive. I think it the time spent learning it may be worthwhile.

On the other hand, it is my personal experience that maintaining separate project files per platform is a perfectly acceptable way of doing things.

Answer 9

The only non-trivial thing about using CMake for cross-compilation is writing the toolchain information: CMake figures out the rest. See http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Cross_Compiling#The_toolchain_file for more information.

Answer 10

I don't know how complex you wanna get, I use mingw-4.4.2 + cmake on linux to compile my Qt4 apps for windows, and NSIS on wine to create the setup files. Basicly I hacked my CMakeLists.txt to use mingw when I pass -DWin32=1. here's the relevent part :

if(WIN32) 
    SET(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE "Release") #force release for win32, no motive to debug on win32

    SET(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE  "-march=pentium4 -mtune=pentium4 -mwindows -DNDEBUG -mno-align-stringops -minline-stringops-dynamically -fno-ident -freorder-blocks-and-partition -finline-limit=700 -mfpmath=sse  -ftree-loop-distribution -floop-block -floop-interchange -floop-strip-mine -findirect-inlining -ftree-switch-conversion ${BASE_CXX_FLAGS}")

    SET(WIN32_BASE /home/win32-devel)
    SET(QT_LIB ${WIN32_BASE}/qt-win-opensource-src-4.5.3/lib/)

    SET(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER i686-pc-mingw32-g++)
    SET(CMAKE_AR i686-pc-mingw32-ar)
    SET(CMAKE_RANLIB  i686-pc-mingw32-ranlib)
    SET(CMAKE_LINKER i686-pc-mingw32-ld)

    ADD_CUSTOM_COMMAND( OUTPUT ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/app_icon.o
                        COMMAND i686-pc-mingw32-windres
                            -I${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}
                            -o${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/app_icon.o
                            -i${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/icons/win32_icon.rc
                        )

    SET(OPENSSL_LIBRARIES  ${WIN32_BASE}/openssl-0.9.8l/libeay32.dll;${WIN32_BASE}/openssl-0.9.8l/libssl32.dll)
    SET(QT_LIBRARIES  ${QT_LIB}QtCore4.dll;${QT_LIB}/QtGui4.dll)
    SET(CMAKE_EXECUTABLE_SUFFIX ".exe")

    include_directories(${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR} ${QT_LIB}../include ${WIN32_BASE}/openssl-0.9.8l/include)
    message("Building For   : Win32")
else()
    include_directories(${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR} ${QT_INCLUDES} ${OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR})
    message("Building For   : Linux")
endif()
SET(CMAKE_SHARED_LIBRARY_LINK_CXX_FLAGS "-Wl,--no-undefined -static-libgcc -Wl,-O1 -Wl,--as-needed -Wl,--sort-common -s")

edit: Forgot to mention that actual development is done using KDevelop 4.

Answer 11

MPC ，“ Makefile，Project和Workspace Creator”，是另一个可能对您有用的工具。