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/ Building GTK+ on Win32 ====================== First you obviously need developer packages for the compile-time dependencies: GDK-Pixbuf, Pango, atk, glib, gettext-runtime, libiconv at least. See http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/dependencies . For people compiling GTK+ with Visual C++ or later, 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. Currently building with Visual Studio 2008 or later is supported, either via Visual Studio project files or via the Meson build system, as described in the below sections. Interchanging between Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 builds should be fine as they use the same CRT (UCRT) DLLs. After installing the dependencies, there are two ways to build GTK+ for win32. 1) GNU tools, ./configure && make install ----------------------------------------- This requires you have mingw and MSYS. Use the configure script, and the resulting Makefiles (which use libtool and gcc to do the compilation). I use this myself, but it can be hard to setup correctly. The full script I run to build GTK+ 2.16 unpacked from a source distribution is as below. This is from bulding GTK+ 2.16.5. I don't use any script like this to build the development branch, as I don't distribute any binaries from development branches. # This is a shell script that calls functions and scripts from # tml@iki.fi's personal work envíronment. It is not expected to be # usable unmodified by others, and is included only for reference. MOD=gtk+ VER=2.16.5 REV=1 ARCH=win32 THIS=${MOD}_${VER}-${REV}_${ARCH} RUNZIP=${MOD}_${VER}-${REV}_${ARCH}.zip DEVZIP=${MOD}-dev_${VER}-${REV}_${ARCH}.zip HEX=`echo $THIS | md5sum | cut -d' ' -f1` TARGET=c:/devel/target/$HEX usedev usemsvs6 ( set -x DEPS=`latest --arch=${ARCH} glib atk cairo pango libpng zlib libtiff jpeg` PROXY_LIBINTL=`latest --arch=${ARCH} proxy-libintl` PKG_CONFIG_PATH= for D in $DEPS; do PATH=/devel/dist/${ARCH}/$D/bin:$PATH [ -d /devel/dist/${ARCH}/$D/lib/pkgconfig ] && PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/devel/dist/${ARCH}/$D/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH done LIBPNG=`latest --arch=${ARCH} libpng` ZLIB=`latest --arch=${ARCH} zlib` LIBTIFF=`latest --arch=${ARCH} libtiff` JPEG=`latest --arch=${ARCH} jpeg` patch -p0 <<'EOF' EOF lt_cv_deplibs_check_method='pass_all' \ CC='gcc -mtune=pentium3 -mthreads' \ CPPFLAGS="-I/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${LIBPNG}/include \ -I/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${ZLIB}/include \ -I/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${LIBTIFF}/include \ -I/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${JPEG}/include \ -I/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${PROXY_LIBINTL}/include" \ LDFLAGS="-L/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${LIBPNG}/lib \ -L/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${ZLIB}/lib \ -L/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${LIBTIFF}/lib \ -L/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${JPEG}/lib \ -L/devel/dist/${ARCH}/${PROXY_LIBINTL}/lib -Wl,--exclude-libs=libintl.a \ -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base" \ LIBS=-lintl \ CFLAGS=-O2 \ ./configure \ --enable-win32-backend \ --disable-gdiplus \ --with-included-immodules \ --without-libjasper \ --enable-debug=yes \ --enable-explicit-deps=no \ --disable-gtk-doc \ --disable-static \ --prefix=$TARGET && libtoolcacheize && rm gtk/gtk.def && (PATH="$PWD/gdk-pixbuf/.libs:/devel/target/$HEX/bin:$PATH" make -j3 install || (rm .libtool-cache* && PATH="/devel/target/$HEX/bin:$PATH" make -j3 install)) && PATH="/devel/target/$HEX/bin:$PATH" gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders >/devel/target/$HEX/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders && grep -v -E 'Automatically generated|Created by|LoaderDir =' <$TARGET/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders >$TARGET/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders.temp && mv $TARGET/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders.temp $TARGET/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loaders && grep -v -E 'Automatically generated|Created by|ModulesPath =' <$TARGET/etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules >$TARGET/etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules.temp && mv $TARGET/etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules.temp $TARGET/etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules && ./gtk-zip.sh && mv /tmp/${MOD}-${VER}.zip /tmp/$RUNZIP && mv /tmp/${MOD}-dev-${VER}.zip /tmp/$DEVZIP ) 2>&1 | tee /devel/src/tml/packaging/$THIS.log (cd /devel && zip /tmp/$DEVZIP src/tml/packaging/$THIS.{sh,log}) && manifestify /tmp/$RUNZIP /tmp/$DEVZIP You should not just copy the above blindly. There are some things in the script that are very specific to *my* build setup on *my* current machine. For instance the "latest" command, the "usedev" and "usemsvs6" shell functions, the /devel/dist folder. The above script is really just meant for reference, to give an idea. You really need to understand what things like PKG_CONFIG_PATH are and set them up properly after installing the dependencies before building GTK+. As you see above, after running configure, one can just say "make install", like on Unix. A post-build fix is needed, running gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders once more to get a correct gdk-pixbuf.loaders file. For a 64-bit build you need to remove the gtk/gtk.def file and let it be regenerated by the makefilery. This is because the 64-bit GTK dll has a slightly different list of exported function names. This is on purpose and not a bug. The API is the same at the source level, and the same #defines of some function names to actually have a _utf8 suffix is used (just to keep the header simpler). But the corresponding non-suffixed function to maintain ABI stability are not needed in the 64-bit case (because there are no older EXEs around that would require such for ABI stability). 2) Microsoft's tools -------------------- There are VS 2008~2019 solution and project files to build GTK+, which are maintained by Chun-wei Fan. They should build GTK+ out of the box, provided that the afore-mentioned dependencies are installed. They will build GDK with the Win32 backend, GTK+ itself (with GAIL/a11y built in), the GAIL-Util library and the gtk-demo program. Please also refer to the README file(s) that reside in win32 on how to enable additional features that are not enabled by default, such as EGL support via libANGLE, which emulate the GL/EGL calls using Direct3D 9/11. Please refer to the following GNOME Live! page for a more detailed ouline on the process of building the GTK+ stack and its dependencies with Visual C++: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK+/Win32/MSVCCompilationOfGTKStack Alternative 1 also generates Microsoft import libraries (.lib), if you have lib.exe available. It might also work for cross-compilation from Unix. I (Tor) use method 1 myself. Hans Breuer has been taking care of the MSVC makefiles. At times, we disagree a bit about various issues, and for instance the makefile.msc files might not produce identically named DLLs and import libraries as the "autoconfiscated" makefiles and libtool do. If this bothers you, you will have to fix the makefiles. 3) 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 3.5 or later - Meson build system, 0.48.0 or later - Ninja (if not using the Visual Studio project generator for Visual Studio 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019) - CMake (optional, used for dependency searching) - pkg-config (optional, 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 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 could 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 are 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 . - Run the following: meson --buildtype=... --prefix=..., where buildtype can be release, debugoptimized, debug or 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, 2015, 2017 and 2019 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: \bin\gtk-query-immodules-3.0.exe > \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 \bin\%~nf mt /manifest %f /outputresource:\bin\%~nf;2 for /r %f in (*.exe.manifest) do if exist \bin\%~nf mt /manifest %f /outputresource:\bin\%~nf;1 for /r %f in (*.dll.manifest) do if exist \lib\gtk-3.0\3.0.0\immodules\%~nf mt /manifest %f /outputresource:\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. Using GTK+ on Win32 =================== To use GTK+ on Win32, you also need either one of the above mentioned compilers. Other compilers might work, but don't count on it. Look for prebuilt developer packages (DLLs, import libraries, headers) on the above website. 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. Wintab ====== The tablet support uses the Wintab API. The Wintab development kit is no longer required. The wintab.h header file is bundled with GTK+ sources. Unfortunately it seems that only Wacom tablets come with support for the Wintab API nowadays. --Tor Lillqvist , --Updated by Fan, Chun-wei