Compiling GLib Applications3GLib LibraryCompiling GLib Applications
How to compile your GLib application
Compiling GLib Applications on UNIX
To compile a GLib application, you need to tell the compiler where to
find the GLib header files and libraries. This is done with the
pkg-config utility.
The following interactive shell session demonstrates how
pkg-config is used (the actual output on
your system may be different):
$ pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0
-I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include
$ pkg-config --libs glib-2.0
-L/usr/lib -lm -lglib-2.0
See the pkg-config website
for more information about pkg-config.
If your application uses or GObject
features, it must be compiled and linked with the options returned
by the following pkg-config invocation:
$ pkg-config --cflags --libs gobject-2.0
If your application uses modules, it must be compiled and linked
with the options returned by one of the following
pkg-config invocations:
$ pkg-config --cflags --libs gmodule-no-export-2.0
$ pkg-config --cflags --libs gmodule-2.0
The difference between the two is that gmodule-2.0 adds
to the linker flags,
which is often not needed.
The simplest way to compile a program is to use the "backticks"
feature of the shell. If you enclose a command in backticks
(not single quotes), then its output will
be substituted into the command line before execution. So to
compile a GLib Hello, World, you would type the following:
$ cc hello.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs glib-2.0` -o hello
Note that the name of the file must come before the other options
(such as pkg-config), or else you may get an
error from the linker.
Deprecated GLib functions are annotated to make the compiler
emit warnings when they are used (e.g. with gcc, you need to use
the -Wdeprecated-declarations option). If these warnings are
problematic, they can be turned off by defining the preprocessor
symbol %GLIB_DISABLE_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS by using the commandline
option -DGLIB_DISABLE_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS
GLib deprecation annotations are versioned; by defining the
macros %GLIB_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED and %GLIB_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED,
you can specify the range of GLib versions whose API you want
to use. APIs that were deprecated before or introduced after
this range will trigger compiler warnings.
Since GLib 2.62, the older deprecation mechanism of hiding deprecated interfaces
entirely from the compiler by using the preprocessor symbol
G_DISABLE_DEPRECATED has been removed. All deprecations
are now handled using the above mechanism.
The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the
toplevel headers glib.h,
glib-object.h, gio.h.
Starting with 2.32, GLib enforces this by generating an error
when individual headers are directly included.
Still, there are some exceptions; these headers have to be included
separately:
gmodule.h,
glib-unix.h,
glib/gi18n-lib.h or
glib/gi18n.h (see
the Internationalization section),
glib/gprintf.h and
glib/gstdio.h
(we don't want to pull in all of stdio).