CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsbuild-systemjson-c
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Reputation: 570

JSON-C build on Windows Platform

Disclaimer: Please read question carefully, This question has a twist so read it till end.

So JSON-C is one of the highly popular library to work on JSON using C programming. Basic illustration on current work, whatever code building here is for multi-platform. Currently Linux & Windows are supported platform and I have small issue with Windows related JSON-C part.

I'm using Cygwin for Windows development, and when I compile JSON-C code as per provided instruction on it's GitHub page, using CMAKE it works out quite good and build system is able generate DLLs for Windows. But if you have worked with Cygwin then you must know that whatever is built using Cygwin, will have dependency on it's run-time environment (cygwin1.dll) (Why does GCC-Windows depend on cygwin?) and it won't be an independent DLL that can be moved around to different system with same architecture. So with this dependency on Cygwin if my project is built on Windows platform, I have to carry around either Cygwin Run-Time Env. or I have to make sure Cygwin installed on target system for smooth execution. This sort of dependency I do not wish to have for my project, it can ruin user experience.

So what I want as help here, Is there a way to build JSON-C independent of Cygwin (run-time environment)??

NOTE: I already know that, if using Cygwin one wishes to create such an independent DLL for Windows then that can be done using few parameters to compiler and some additional macros placed in-front of function declaration as described here Creating a DLL in GCC or Cygwin?
But I don't see such support in source code JSON-C for Windows. So I was just wondering if JSON-C Dev team has kept some provision via build-system then I'm keen to know that part.

PS: I have not dipped into JSON-C build system yet due to my other development, so if anyone out there (my beloved community) has anything on this then please share, that would be terrific.

EDIT
Forgot to mention the version I'm using :p json-c-0.13.1-20180305

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3410

Answers (1)

Brecht Sanders
Brecht Sanders

Reputation: 7287

I am able to build JSON-C 0.14-20200419 (from https://github.com/json-c/json-c) under MSYS2 with MinGW-w64 - both static and shared - using these instructions (replace /usr/local as needed):

INSTALLPREFIX=/usr/local
mkdir -p build_static build_shared &&
 cmake.exe -Wno-dev -GNinja -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$INSTALLPREFIX -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=OFF -DBUILD_TESTING:BOOL=OFF -S. -Bbuild_static &&
 cmake.exe -Wno-dev -GNinja -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$INSTALLPREFIX -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=ON -DBUILD_TESTING:BOOL=OFF -S. -Bbuild_shared &&
 ninja -Cbuild_static install/strip &&
 ninja -Cbuild_shared install/strip &&
 echo Success

If you don't have ninja you can probably also use -G"MSYS Makefiles" and use make instead of ninja.

Note that MinGW-w64 is different from Cygwin in that it compiles to native Windows binaries without dependancies on a compatibility layer (like Cygwin's cygwin1.dll). The following screenshots illustrates this: enter image description here

Upvotes: 0

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