From an higher level overview, CppSharp will take a bunch of user-provided C/C++ headers and generate either C++/CLI or C# code that can be compiled into a regular .NET assembly.
To get started you can either compile from source or get one of the pre-compiled binary releases (only provided for Windows, at the moment):
- Clone CppSharp Git repository
- Setup LLVM and Clang dependencies
- Generate build files using Premake
- Build the source code
- Generate bindings
You can either build LLVM and Clang from source or download one of our pre-built binary dependency packages (the same ones we use for all our continuous integration (CI) builds).
The dependencies can be automatically downloaded by running:
cd <CppSharp>\build
premake5 --file=scripts/LLVM.lua download_llvm # on Windows
premake5-osx --file=scripts/LLVM.lua download_llvm # on OSX
premake5-linux-64 --file=scripts/LLVM.lua download_llvm # on Linux
Alternatively, if on Windows, just double click on <CppSharp>/build/DownloadDeps.bat
.
After this, you should end up with one or multiple <CppSharp>/build/scripts/llvm-<revision>-<os>-<configuration>
folders
containing the headers and libraries for LLVM.
If you do not end up with the folder, which can happen due to, for instance, not having 7-Zip on the path on Windows,
then you can manually extract the .7z archives in <CppSharp>/build/scripts
to their respective folders.
Please check the guide in Compiling LLVM and Clang from source
cd <CppSharp>\build
GenerateProjects.bat
msbuild vs2013\CppSharp.sln /p:Configuration=Release;Platform=x86
Building in Release is recommended because else the Clang parser will be excruciatingly slow.
It has been reported that running the solution upgrade process under VS 2013 breaks the build due to an incompatibility of .NET versions between projects (4.5 and 4.0). If you experience this problem you can change the targetted .NET version of the projects to be the same or just do not run the upgrade process after generation.
- Run
./premake5-osx gmake
in<CppSharp>\build
- Build the generated makefiles:
- 32-bit builds:
config=release_x32 make -C gmake
- 64-bit builds:
config=release_x64 make -C gmake
- 32-bit builds:
The version you compile needs to match the version of the Mono VM installed on your
system which you can find by running mono --version
. The reason for this is because
a 32-bit VM will only be able to load 32-bit shared libraries and vice-versa for 64-bits.
Only 64-bits builds are supported at the moment.
We depend on a somewhat recent version of Mono (.NET 4.5). Ubuntu 14.04 contains recent enough Mono by default, which you can install with:
sudo apt-get install mono-devel
If you are using another distribution then please look into the download page on the Mono website.
Generate the makefiles, and build CppSharp:
cd <CppSharp>/build
./premake5-linux-64 gmake
make -C gmake config=release_x64
If you need more verbosity from the builds invoke make
as:
verbose=true make -C gmake config=release_x64
If you get the following error, please see issue #625:
/usr/include/wchar.h(39,11): fatal: 'stdarg.h' file not found CppSharp has encountered an error while parsing code.
You can now progress to generating your first bindings, explained in our Generating bindings page.