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Building MSCL for Windows

Hold up!

Most users will not need to build MSCL themselves!

Pre-built versions are available for download. To get it, head over to the MSCL Releases Page, for the latest release. Under the Downloads section of that release, you will find the C++, Python, and C# versions of MSCL, as well as Example Code and Documentation.

I really want to build it myself

Ok, if you are making changes to MSCL's source code, or need to build MSCL from scratch for any other reason, here are the steps to build for Windows:

Dependencies

For more information on how to configure the build to use, or not use the optional dependencies see this section

Required
Optional

Since Windows has no standard path for libraries to be installed in, we will refer to LIB_PATH as the location that you will install dependencies. Each of these paths can be configured at build time, but for reference, this is what a common LIB_PATH directory will look like:

  • LIB_PATH/boost/boost_1_68_0
  • LIB_PATH/openssl
  • LIB_PATH/swig/swigwin-4.0.0 (for .NET and Python builds)
  • LIB_PATH/NaturalDocs

Installing Boost

SourceForge hosts some Pre-Built Boost binaries for Windows. Simply installing these for your specific compiler will make it so you do not need to build Boost yourself, which can be time-consuming.

If you want to install Boost yourself, you can follow the instructions on Boost's Getting Started page.

Building MSCL for C++

  1. Clone or download the MSCL repo. The location of MSCL will be referred to as <Project Root> for the rest of this guide.
  2. Create a build directory. We will refer to this directory as build for the rest of the documentation, and it will be located at <Project Root>/build but it can be named anything and put anywhere as long as you update the following steps accordingly.
  3. Open a new powershell terminal in <Project Root>/build and run the following command to configure the project. If you want to add options to build language bindings, or change configuration, see this section and add the desired options as -D flags to the end of this command: 
    # Please note that you should change ".." to wherever the project is located if you did not put the "build" directory directly in <Project Root>
cmake ..
  4. In the same terminal, run the following command to build all the requested targets: 
    cmake --build .
  5. All build artifacts will be located in the <Project Root>/build directory in a somewhat unorderly directory structure, but the important artifacts such as the libraries, header files, etc. will be copied to <Project Root>/Output in a more orderly directory structure
  6. If you want to build the zip files run the following command after building: 
    cmake --build . --target zip

Configuring the build

The CMakeLists.txt file exposes several parameters to the user to allow you to enable or disable different parts of the build. These options can be set in the configuration step documented above by prepending them with -D and setting them to the desired value. For example, to build python3, I would run the command:

cmake .. -DBUILD_PYTHON3=ON
Boolean Parameters

The following table lists some parameters that can be set to ON or OFF to enable, or disable certain pieces of the build

Parameter Description Default
BUILD_SHARED_LIBS Build MSCL as a shared library as well as a static library OFF
BUILD_PYTHON2 Build the Python2 bindings for MSCL. Note that this requires swig and python2 to be installed OFF
BUILD_PYTHON3 Build the Python3 bindings for MSCL. Note that this requires swig and python3 to be installed OFF
BUILD_CSHARP Build the C# bindings for MSCL. Note that this requires swig and a csharp compiler to be installed OFF
BUILD_TESTS Build the unit tests for MSCL. This also enables the test CMake target. Note that this also requires that turtle be installed OFF
BUILD_EXAMPLES Build the examples in MSCL_Examples OFF
BUILD_DOCUMENTATION Builds the documentation using NaturalDocs. OFF
WITH_SSL Whether to build with SSL support. Note that this requires openssl to be installed ON
WITH_WEBSOCKETS Whether to build with Websocket support ON
String Parameters
Parameter Description Default
TURTLE_INCLUDE_DIR Directory where the turtle include files are installed. Only required if include files are in a nonstandard place. C:/lib/turtle/include
NATURAL_DOCS_ROOT Directory to search for the NaturalDocs executable. Only required if BUILD_DOCUMENTATION is true, and NaturalDocs is installed somewhere nonstandard C:/lib/NaturalDocs
Other parameters

MSCL uses existing find_package calls to find other packages such as boost, OpenSSL, etc. which all expose their own variables that can be overridden in the same way as the above parameters. See the following documentation for more information on how to configure the find_package call for those modules: