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GettingStarted.md

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Getting started

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):

Building from source

Common setup

  1. Clone CppSharp Git repository
  2. Setup LLVM and Clang dependencies
  3. Generate build files using Premake
  4. Build the source code
  5. Generate bindings

Setting up LLVM and Clang dependencies

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).

Downloading the LLVM and Clang packages

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 --file=scripts/LLVM.lua download_llvm # on Linux

Alternatively, if on Windows, just run <CppSharp>/build/DownloadDeps.bat from a Visual Studio command prompt corresponding to the VS version you want to use.

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.

Building LLVM and Clang from source

Please check the guide in Compiling LLVM and Clang from source

Compiling on Windows/Visual Studio

  1. Generate the VS solution and project files
cd <CppSharp>\build
GenerateProjects.bat
  1. Compile the project

You can open CppSharp.sln and hit F5 or compile via the command line:

msbuild vs2017\CppSharp.sln /p:Configuration=Release;Platform=x86

Building in Release is recommended because else we will use the Clang parser debug configuration, which will be too slow for practical use beyond debugging.

Compiling on macOS or Linux

  1. Change directory to <CppSharp>\build
  2. Run ./Compile.sh to generate the project files and compile the code.

If the above script fails, you can try these equivalent manual steps:

  1. Generate the Makefiles
./premake5-osx gmake # if on OSX
./premake5-linux gmake # if on Linux
  1. Build the generated makefiles:
    • 32-bit builds: make -C gmake config=release_x86
    • 64-bit builds: make -C gmake config=release_x64

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.

If you need more verbosity from the builds invoke make as:

make -C gmake config=release_x64 verbose=true

Running the testsuite

  1. Change directory to <CppSharp>\build
  2. Run ./InstallNugets.sh to install the NUnit test runner from Nuget.
  3. Run ./RunTests.sh to run the tests.

Linux notes

Only 64-bits builds are supported.

We depend on a recent version of Mono.

Please look into the download page on the Mono website for official install instructions.

Generating bindings

You can now progress to generating your first bindings, explained in our Generating bindings page.