Compiling owlkettle in Windows

[RickBarretto]

Hello there, I noticed that owkettle doesn't have any build instructions for Windows, nevertheless I wanted to compile using Msys2's ecosystem.

A priori, I had some problems while trying to compile, specially because of the ld. You can see the returned errors in this thread from Discord.

How I solved it

Basically, I removed this two lines: owlkettle/cairo#80 and owlkettle/gtk#80, and passed manually these arguments via config.nims with:

--passL: "-lgtk-4 -lpangowin32-1.0 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lharfbuzz -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lcairo-gobject -lcairo -lgraphene-1.0 -lgio-2.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -lintl"

For some reason, since I can't use gorge("pkg-config --libs cairo") into a nims file to pass the pkg-config's result to --passL, so I did it manually in my terminal and pasted the result to --passL.

Also, build using Msys2 or Mingw terminal, it's not working to me while using VsCode's terminal.

Updates

So, I tried again and again, and ✨ finally ✨ found the error here, as you can see in this Thread. The above solution works, but if you want to understand what is happening, please read this.

Basically the problem is the gorge function. gorge is returning a multiline string what is breaking the ld's parameters...

So, if you write

{.passl: "-lgtk-4 -lpangowin32-1.0 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lharfbuzz -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lcairo-gobject -lcairo -lgraphene-1.0 -lgio-2.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -lintl" .}

or

import std/strutils
{.passl: gorge("pkg-config --libs gtk4").strip() .}

into your main file, and delete the config.nims it'll work as well.

The proof I found that gorge is returning a multiline was:

static:
  echo "\n." 
  echo gorge "pkg-config --libs gtk4"
  echo "."

That returns:

.
-lgtk-4 -lpangowin32-1.0 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lharfbuzz -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lcairo-gobject -lcairo -lgraphene-1.0 -lgio-2.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -lintl

.

---

Side note: How I installed gtk4

Basically, as I said, I'm using Msys2, so I just followed this the official installation instructions:

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk4

---

It's all, folks! 🙂
I hope I have helped with something.

Any suggestion or thoughts of how can I made it simpler, you can comment bellow.

Also, thanks @PhilippMDoerner for your support! 🎉

[PhilippMDoerner]

I think this would be a fantastic thing to add as a page in the nimibook docs of owlkettle.
We could change the page "Tooling" into a section "Tooling".
The current "Tooling" page could then be added to that section under the name "GTK Tools".
The contents of what you just figured out lastly could be also a page there called "Windows MSys2" or something like that.

It would let others benefit from the time you had to invest to find these answers, which I think would be quite worthwhile.
Though I'm of course not the maintainer of the project so my word holds no sway here, just wanted to voice my opinion.

[RickBarretto]

I hope my discussion will be considered outdated soon, since I made this PR:

• Fix gorge breaking builds #54

Furthermore, add instructions for Windows would be awesome. And would be happy to do a PR for it too. 🙂

[can-lehmann]

This is awesome! Thank you for figuring this out and creating the PR for it 😄

@PhilippMDoerner I also agree that this should be documented in the owlkettle docs. I think it might be worth it to create a new Installation section in the docs that describes the installation on Linux, Windows and MacOS (I believe some people got it working there too).

[PhilippMDoerner]

Ohhh yeah that's a way better idea. I was thinking about it in terms of "You use this with owlkettle", but from an actual user perspective this is all just setup. That makes more sense!

[RickBarretto]

BTW, a totally aside message:

@can-lehmann, Thank you for owlkettle. This project represents what a good library should be for Nim!
The use of macros and templates for make the developer's life easier, what it uses this very well.

Other projects has their own languages just to implement UI and make it declarative and easier to understand (QT with QML and Kivy with KV, for instance). But this project and Nim's metaprogramming allow us to make it seamless, with a beautiful and understandable code... 🙂

It demonstrates how metaprogramming can be used to benefit all of us.