Add dllexport mechanism to allow dll usage about pmp-library

[dsieger]

Merged into master, closing.

[petrasvestartas]

I would like to use PMP for my research in CAD environment for PInvoke with .NET libraries. But for this I need to know how to compile PMP to C++ .dll. While the PInvoke I can do myself.

Is it possible to do this any time soon?
Or is it somehow possible to configure cmakelists so that I could compile via cmake?

[petrasvestartas]

Anyone?

[dsieger]

I'm looking into this. The thing is: I'd like to avoid the classic approach of sprinkling dllexport macros all over the code. There is some support in newer CMake versions to automatically export the symbols. This seems to work, but I have not tested it beyond compiling our code. I also need to implement a solution for our test runner to find the dlls.

I pushed my current state to the dllexport branch, maybe that's already good enough to get you started.

[petrasvestartas]

Thank you for the reply

Is it enough to write two lines in windows bash/terminal from repo of dllexport?

git clone --recursive https://github.com/pmp-library/pmp-library.git

cd pmp-library && mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make

Do I need to download additional libraries or specially configure cmake?

[dsieger]

You'll need to switch to the dllexport branch after checkout:

git checkout dllexport

The build command probably is not make on Windows. You could use something like

cmake --build .

No additional libraries required, shared libraries are enabled by default. This might become a CMake option before merging to master.

[petrasvestartas]

I did this which allows to get the "pmp-library.sln" project:

$ git clone --single-branch --branch dllexport --recursive https://github.com/pmp-library/pmp-library.git
cd pmp-library && mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make

After which I have following:

And after opening "pmp-library.sln" in Visual Studio and building all projects, I see some .dll files :

When you replied:
cmake --build .

Does it mean that in Bash I can directly write this to build projects even without Visual Studio:
cd pmp-library && mkdir build && cd build && cmake --build .
instead of:
cd pmp-library && mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make

What minimal example shall I test to minimally know that I can load a file (without UI) ?

The reason for asking about UI is that there is quite a lot of references and I do not know which ones are responsible for executing mesh methods and which ones are for display:

[dsieger]

And after opening "pmp-library.sln" in Visual Studio and building all projects, I see some .dll files :

That looks OK.

Does it mean that in Bash I can directly write this to build projects even without Visual Studio:

Yes, cmake --build will invoke MSBuild to build the solution.

What minimal example shall I test to minimally know that I can load a file (without UI) ?

You can pick any of the examples from the examples directory. They only link against the core library containing the data structure and algorithms, no UI involved. You can build the examples by configuring CMake with

cmake -DWITH_EXAMPLES=ON ..

[petrasvestartas]

Sorry, I am not very familiar with CMake, should I modify this file:
https://github.com/pmp-library/pmp-library/blob/dllexport/CMakeLists.txt

If yes, which line?

Or I should add this line
cmake -DWITH_EXAMPLES=ON ..
To this:

cd pmp-library && mkdir build && cd build && cmake --build .

[dsieger]

cd pmp-library && mkdir build && cd build && cmake -DWITH_EXAMPLES=ON .. && cmake --build .

should do the trick. However, I'd suggest to get more familiar with CMake. This type of question / support usually is beyond the scope of our project.

[petrasvestartas]

Yay... Thank you very much for all your patience. It runs: