Compiling libexif as static lib with Visual Studio 2010 - then linking from Visual C++ project

Question

Is it possible to compile libexif with Visual Studio 2010? I have been trying to do so and have been running into a whole slew of problems. I cannot find any information about whether anybody has successfully done this before. I know I can use MinGW to compile the library, but I am in a situation where I need it to be compiled with Visual Studio and then need to link to it from a Visual C++ app. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Read the "readme-win32.txt" file. Advice is:

hack yourself a build system somehow.
This seems to be the Windows way of doing things.

Don't get your hopes up. The *nix way of doing things is the configuration script that needs to be run first. It auto-generates source files to marry the library to the specific flavor of *nix. The configuration script is almost half a megabyte. Three times as much code as in the actual .c files :) You cannot reasonably get that working without MinGW so you can execute the script. Once you got that done, you've got a better shot at it with a VS solution. As long as it doesn't use too much C99 specific syntax.

Answer 2

To answer your question: Yes it is possible... but it is a bit of a hack. Libexif uses functions that MSVC has chosen not to implement. See my working example VS2010 project below (if you don't like downloading files then skip to my explanation of what needed changing to get it to work below):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l6wowl8pouux01a/libexif-0.6.21_CompiledInVS2010%2BExample.7z?dl=0

To elaborate, the issues that needed a "hack" (as hinted in the LibExif readme-win32.txt documentation) are:

• Libexif uses inline in several places which is not defined in VS for C, only C++ (see this)

• Libexif uses snprintf extensively in the code which is not defined in VS (see here)

• You need to create the config.h yourself without a ./configure command to help you. You could read through the script but most of it doesn't make sense for Windows VS2010.

• You will need to define GETTEXT_PACKAGE because it's probably setup in the configure file. I just choose UTF-8, whether that is correct or not I'm not sure.

• There was a random unsigned static * that needed to be moved from a .c file to the .h file as C in VS doesn't allow you to create new variables inside functions in the particular way they were trying to do.