[swarm-hackers] building Tcl, Tk and BLT for 64 bit Windows

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Hi,

Some notes on building Tcl, Tk, and BLT for 64 bit Windows.  (Hard 
enough won that I thought it was worth writing down..)

First, to provide support for the structured exception handling used by 
Tcl &Tk, which doesn't have 64 bit support in the non-Microsoft #ifdefs, 
it's necessary to get the 2003 R2 Platform SDK Web Install.  It's a 
no-cost download.

   
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0baf2b35-c656-4969-ace8-e4c0c0716adb&displaylang=en

I've attached the scripts I use to build. Non-obvious things here are 1) 
the need to force use of the SDK 64 bit compiler and its headers.  Tcl & 
Tk have autoconf logic that look for the 2003 version (the current 
Windows 7 SDK for 3.5 does not work).  The script ensures these 
resources are used earlier in autoconf tests.  Also, note 2) The use of 
`short' pathnames to sneak through paths with spaces that would 
otherwise befuddle the autoconf scripts due to whitespace non-quoting 
issues.

I found it's easier to build BLT with the MingW64 cross compiler on 
Linux -- the BLT Makefiles for Microsoft tools are bit-rotty.   Here I 
specify --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 as an argument configure and first 
export the environment variables RANLIB=x86_64-w64-mingw32-ranlib and 
CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc.  Before running BLT configure I installed the 
Tcl/Tk with the Microsoft compilers to a subdirectory that was shared 
with the one used in the Linux environment (a Virtualbox shared folder), 
and use --with-tcl and --with-tk to point the lib/ subdirectory in this 
install.

This is the only BLT patch I have needed to get the BLT demos to work on 
my 64 bit Windows 7 machine.

In blt2.4z/win/X11/X.h add the first clause:

#ifdef WIN64
typedef __int64 XID;
#else
typedef unsigned long XID;
#endif

I am using the BLT SRPM for Fedora (12), which tracks Tcl/Tk 8.5 whereas 
the last official source release does not.  Also it has some bug fixes.

Marcus

build-tcl
Description: Text document

build-tk
Description: Text document