gtk/README.win32.md

Notes on running GTK on Windows in general

The Win32 backend in GTK+ is not as stable or correct as the X11 one.

For prebuilt runtime and developer packages see http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/

Notes on using OpenGL (GtkGLArea/GdkGLArea) on Win32

Note that on Windows, if one is running Nahimic 3 on a system with nVidia graphics, one needs to stop the "Nahimic service" or insert the GTK application into the Nahimic blacklist, as noted in https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/297952/nahimic-and-nvidia-drivers-conflict/2334568/ if using programs that utilise GtkGLArea and/or GdkGLArea, or use GDK_GL=gles if you know that GLES support is enabled for the build.

This is a known issue, as the above link indicates, and affects quite a number of applications--sadly, since this issue lies within the nVidia graphics driver and/or the Nahimic 3 code, we are not able to rememdy this on the GTK side; the best bet before trying the above workarounds is to try to update your graphics drivers and Nahimic installation.

Building GTK+ on Win32

First you obviously need developer packages for the compile-time dependencies: GDK-Pixbuf, Pango, HarfBuzz**, atk, cairo and glib. You will also need libffi, gettext-runtime, libiconv and PCRE (or PCRE2 for glib-2.74.x and later) and zlib for GLib; Cairo with DirectWrite support and/or FontConfig support for best font shaping and display supportin Pango*; and librsvg, libpng, libjpeg-turbo and libtiff for loading the various icons via GDK-Pixbuf that are common to GTK. You will need a Rust installation with the appropriate toolchain installed as well, if building librsvg-2.42.x or later.

(MinGW users should also look at the following section on the dependencies that are required, either built from source or installed using pacman.

Notes on building with Visual Studio

You may wish to build the dependencies from the sources (all are required for the best use experience unless noted).

For Visual Studio, it is possible to build the following with CMake:

• zlib
• libpng
• FreeType (used in FontConfig, optionally used in Cairo and HarfBuzz)
• libexpat (used in FontConfig)
• libxml2 (needed for GResource support during build time and librsvg/libcroco)
• libbrotlidec (optional, used in FreeType, requires Visual Studio 2013 or later)
• libjpeg-turbo (you also need NASM, unless building for ARM64)
• libtiff (requires libjpeg-turbo and zlib)
• HarfBuzz** (for pre-2.6.0, using Meson is recommended for 2.6.0 or later)
• PCRE (for glib-2.72.x and earlier), or PCRE2 (for glib-2.74.x or later)

It is possible to build the following items using Meson:

• HarfBuzz** (2.6.0 and later)
• Cairo (1.17.x or later; for 1.16.x, you need mozilla-build to build from the MSVC Makefiles, building cairo-gobject is required)
• FontConfig (needed if PangoFT2 is used. Note building Cairo with FontConfig is required, requires Visual Studio 2015 or later)
• fribidi (required for Pango)
• GLib, ATK, Pango, GDK-Pixbuf
• gobject-introspection (recommended, if using language bindings or gedit is desired, requires GLib and libffi)
• pixman (required for Cairo)
• libepoxy***

For Visual Studio, Visual Studio projects or NMake Makefiles are provided with the following:

• librsvg (runtime, 2.42.x or later require Visual Studio 2013 or later with a Rust MSVC toolchain installed; requires libxml2)
• libcroco (required for librsvg-2.40.x or earlier, requires libxml2)
• libbz2 (optional for FreeType)
• nasm (needed for building libjpeg-turbo on x86/x64)
• adwaita-icon-theme (run-time, after building GTK and librsvg)

NMake Makefiles are provided as an add-on with patches to build the sources, at https://github.com/fanc999/gtk-deps-msvc/, under $(dependency) / $(dep_version)

• libiconv (used by gettext-runtime)
• gettext-runtime (and gettext-tools; an alternative is to use proxy-intl during the GLib build, at the cost of not having translations being built, VS2015 or later is required for 0.21.1 and later)
• libffi (currently, manually adapting the pkg-config .pc.in template is needed; an older x86/x64 version can be built in-place if building GLib without libffi installed)

You also need a copy of stdint.h and inttypes.h from msinttypes for Visual Studio 2012 or earlier (stdint.h is optional on VS2010 or later), as well as an implementation of stdbool.h.

Bleeding-edge versions of the dependencies may require Visual Studio 2015/2017 or later.

ARM64 builds are supported in addition to x86 and x64 builds, albeit without SIMD optimizations in pixman and libjpeg-turbo (SIMD support may need to be explicitly disabled). Please see the Meson documentation on how to set up a cross-build from an x86-based Windows system. Introspection support is not supported in this configuration.

Building just using Meson without the dependencies installed may work if the following conditions are met:

• Visual Studio 2017 15.9.x or later is installed
• git is accessible in the %PATH%, to pull in the depedencies
• The CMake-built dependencies should be pre-built.
• Only building for x86/x64 is supported this way, ARM64 builds should at least have pixman and libffi prebuilt.
• librsvg and adwaita-icon-theme must be built separately
• gettext-runtime and libiconv must also be prebuilt if translations support is desired.

Notes on certain dependencies:

• (*)DirectWrite support in Pango requires pango-1.50.12 or later with Cairo 1.17.6 or later. Visual Studio 2015 or later is required to build Pango 1.50.x or later.
• (**)HarfBuzz is required if using Pango-1.44.x or later, or if building PangoFT2. If using Visual Studio 2013 or earlier, only HarfBuzz 2.4.0 or earlier is supported. Visual Studio 2017 15.9.x or later is required for 3.3.0 or later. You may wish to build FreeType prior to building HarfBuzz, and then building FreeType again linking to HarfBuzz for a more comprehensive FreeType build. Font features support is only enabled if PangoFT2 is built or Pango-1.44.x and HarfBuzz 2.2.0 or later are installed.
• (***)For building with GLES support (currently supported via libANGLE), you will need to obtain libANGLE from its latest GIT checkout or from QT 5.10.x. You will need to build libepoxy with EGL enabled using -Degl=yes when configuring the build.

Some outdated builds of the dependencies may be found at http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/dependencies .

For people compiling GTK+ with Visual C++, it is recommended that the same compiler is used for at least GDK-Pixbuf, Pango, atk and glib so that crashes and errors caused by different CRTs can be avoided.

For Visual Studio 2008 and 2010, a special setup making use of the Windows 8.0 SDK is required, see at the bottom of this document for guidance. Interchanging between Visual Studio 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2022 builds should be fine as they use the same CRT (UCRT) DLLs.

The following describes how one can build GTK with MinGW or Visual Studio 2008 or later using Meson.

Using Meson (for Visual Studio and MinGW builds)

Meson can now be used to build GTK+-3.x with either MinGW or Visual Studio. You will need the following items in addition to all the dependencies listed above:

• Python 3.6.x or later (later Meson versions require Python 3.7.x)
• Meson build system, 0.60.0 or later
• Ninja (if not using the Visual Studio project generator for Visual Studio 2010 or later)
• CMake (recommended for Visual Studio builds, used for dependency searching)
• pkg-config (or some compatible tool, highly recommended)

For all Windows builds, note that unless -Dbuiltin_immodules=no is specified, the input modules (immodules) are built directly into the GTK DLL.

For building with Meson using Visual Studio, do the following:

• Create an empty build directory somewhere that is on the same drive as the source tree, and launch the Visual Studio command prompt that matches the build configuration (Visual Studio version and architecture), and run the following:

• Ensure that both the installation directory of Python 3.6+ and its script directory is in your %PATH%, as well as the Ninja, CMake and pkg-config executables (if used). If a pkg-config compatible drop-in replacement tool is being used, ensure that PKG_CONFIG is set to point to the executable of that tool as well.

• For non-GNOME dependencies (such as Cairo and Harfbuzz), where pkg-config files or CMake files may not be properly located, set %INCLUDE% and %LIB% to ensure that their header files and .lib files can be found respectively. The DLLs of those dependencies should also be in the %PATH% during the build as well, especially if introspection files ar to be built.

• For GNOME dependencies, the pkg-config files for those dependencies should be searchable by pkg-config (or a compatible tool). Verify this by running $(PKG_CONFIG) --modversion <dependency>.

• Run the following: meson <path_to_directory_of_this_file> --buildtype=... --prefix=..., where buildtype` can be:

  • release
  • debugoptimized
  • debug
  • plain.

  Please refer to the Meson documentation for more details. You may also wish to pass in -Dbroadway_backend=true if building the Broadway GDK backend is desired, and/or pass in -Dbuiltin_immodules=no to build the immodules as standalone DLLs that can be loaded by GTK dynamically. For Visual Studio 2010 or later builds, you may pass in --backend=vs to generate Visual Studio project files to be used to carry out the builds.

  If you are building with Visual Studio 2008, note the following items as well:

  • For x64 builds, the compiler may hang when building the certain files, due to optimization issues in the compiler. If this happens, use the Windows Task Manager and terminate all cl.exe processes, and the build will fail with the source files that did not finish compiling due to the hang. Look for them in build.ninja in the build directory, and change their compiler flag /O2 to /O1, and the compilation and linking should proceed normally.

  • At this time of writing, the following files are known to cause this hang:

    • gtk\gtkfilechoosernativewin32.c
    • gtk\gtkfilesystemmodel.c
    • gtk\gtktextsegment.c
    • gtk\gtktextbtree.c
    • gtk\gtkrbtree.c
    • testsuite\gtk\treemodel.c
    • testsuite\gtk\textbuffer.c
    • testsuite\gtk\rbtree.c
    • testsuite\gtk\icontheme.c

  • Upon running install (via "ninja install"), it is likely that gtk-query-immodules-3.0.exe will fail to run as it cannot find msvcr90.dll or msvcr90D.dll. You can ignore this if you did not specify -Dbuiltin_immodules=no when configuring via Meson. If -Dbuiltin_immodules=no is specified, you need to run the following after embedding the manifests as outlined in the next point: $(gtk_install_prefix)\bin\gtk-query-immodules-3.0.exe > $(gtk_install_prefix)\lib\gtk-3.0\3.0.0\immodules.cache

  • You will need to run the following upon completing install, from the build directory in the Visual Studio 2008/SDK 6.0 command prompt (third line is not needed unless -Dbuiltin_immodules=no is specified) so that the built binaries can run:

      for /r %f in (*.dll.manifest) do if exist $(gtk_install_prefix)\bin\%~nf mt /manifest %f /outputresource:$(gtk_install_prefix)\bin\%~nf;2
      for /r %f in (*.exe.manifest) do if exist $(gtk_install_prefix)\bin\%~nf mt /manifest %f /outputresource:$(gtk_install_prefix)\bin\%~nf;1
      for /r %f in (*.dll.manifest) do if exist $(gtk_install_prefix)\lib\gtk-3.0\3.0.0\immodules\%~nf mt /manifest %f /outputresource:$(gtk_install_prefix)\lib\gtk-3.0\3.0.0\immodules\%~nf;2

• The more modern visual style for the print dialog is not applied for Visual Studio 2008 builds. Any solutions to this is really appreciated.

Support for all pre-2012 Visual Studio builds

This release of GTK+ requires at least the Windows 8.0 or later SDK in order to be built successfully using Visual Studio, which means that building with Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 is possible only with a special setup and must be done in the command line with Ninja, if using Meson.
Please see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/using-the-windows-software-development-kit-sdk-for-windows-8-consumer-preview-with-visual-studio-2010/ for references; basically, assuming that your Windows 8.0 SDK is installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0 ($(WIN8SDKDIR) in short), you need to ensure the following before invoking Meson to configure the build. Your project files or Visual Studio IDE must also be similarly configured (using the Windows 8.1 SDK is also possible for Visual Studio 2008~2012, replacing $(WIN8SDKDIR) with $(WIN81SDKDIR), which is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1 unless otherwise indicated):

• Your %INCLUDE% (i.e. "Additional Include Directories" in the IDE) must not include the Windows 7.0/7.1 SDK include directories, and $(WIN8SDKDIR)\include\um, $(WIN8SDKDIR)\include\um\share and $(WIN8SDKDIR)\include\winrt (in this order) must be before your stock Visual Studio 2008/2010 header directories. If you have the DirectX SDK (2010 June or earlier) installed, you should remove its include directory from your %INCLUDE% as well.

• You must replace the Windows 7.0/7.1 SDK library directory in %LIB% (i.e. "Additional Library Paths" in the IDE) with the Windows 8.0/8.1 SDK library directory, i.e. $(WIN8SDKDIR)\lib\win8\um\[x86|x64] or $(WIN81SDKDIR)\lib\winv6.3\um\[x86|x64]. If you have the DirectX SDK installed, you should remove its library directory from your %LIB% as well.

• You must replace the Windows 7.0/7.1 SDK tools directory from your %PATH% ("Executables Directories" in the IDE) with the Windows 8.0 SDK tools directory, i.e. $(WIN8SDKDIR)\bin\[x86|x64]. If you have the DirectX SDK installed, you should remove its utility directory from your %PATH% as well.

• The Windows 8.0/8.1 SDK headers may contain an roapi.h that cannot be used under plain C, so to remedy that, change the following lines (around lines 55-57):

  // RegisterActivationFactory/RevokeActivationFactory registration cookie
  typedef struct {} *RO_REGISTRATION_COOKIE;
  // RegisterActivationFactory/DllGetActivationFactory callback

to

  // RegisterActivationFactory/RevokeActivationFactory registration cookie
  #ifdef __cplusplus
  typedef struct {} *RO_REGISTRATION_COOKIE;
  #else
  typedef struct _RO_REGISTRATION_COOKIE *RO_REGISTRATION_COOKIE; /* make this header includable in C files */
  #endif
  // RegisterActivationFactory/DllGetActivationFactory callback

This follows what is done in the Windows 8.1 SDK, which contains an roapi.h that is usable under plain C. Please note that you might need to copy that file into a location that is in your %INCLUDE% which precedes the include path for the Windows 8.0 SDK headers, if you do not have administrative privileges.

Visual Studio 2008 hacks

(Please see the section on Meson builds which touch on this topic)

Multi-threaded use of GTK+ on Win32

Multi-threaded GTK+ programs might work on Windows in special simple cases, but not in general. Sorry. If you have all GTK+ and GDK calls in the same thread, it might work. Otherwise, probably not at all. Possible ways to fix this are being investigated.

• Tor Lillqvist tml@iki.fi, tml@novell.com
• Updated by Fan, Chun-wei fanc999@yahoo.com.tw