I want to make a game using SDL2, but I'm unable to compile and/or run my code, please help!
SDL2 is notoriously hard to set up, and it's often the first library aspiring game developers try to use.
This post is intended as a canonical duplicate for common problems with setting up SDL2.
This answer is about MinGW / GCC, and not Visual Studio.
This answer only applies to Windows.
Common errors
The common errors are:
SDL.h: No such file or directory (when compiling)
Various SDL_main problems: "undefined reference to SDL_main", "conflicting types for SDL_main" or "number of arguments doesn't match prototype", etc. (when compiling or linking)
undefined reference to other functions (when linking)
DLL problems: (when running your program)
'??.dll' was not found
procedure entry point ... could not be located in ..., and other mysterious DLL-related errors
The program seemingly doing nothing when launched
This list is sorted from bad to good. If you change something and get a different error, use this list to tell if you made things better or worse.
The preamble
0. Don't follow bad advice.
Some resources will suggest you to do #define SDL_MAIN_HANDLED or #undef main. Don't blindly follow that advice, it's not how SDL2 is intended to be used.
If you do everything correcty, it will never be necessary. Learn the intended approach first. Then you can research what exactly that does, and make an educated decision.
1. Figure out how to compile directly from the console, you can start using an IDE and/or build system later.
If you're using an IDE, I suggest to first make sure you're able to compile your program directly from the console, to rule out any IDE configuration problems. After you figure that out, you can use the same compiler options in your IDE.
The same applies to build systems, such as CMake.
2. Download the right SDL2 files. Make sure you have the right files. You need the archive called SDL2-devel-2.0.x-mingw.tar.gz from here.
Extract it to any directory, preferably somewhere near your source code. Extracting into the compiler installation directory is often considered a bad practice (and so is copying them to C:\Windows, which is a horrible idea).
3. Know the difference between compiler flags and linker flags. A "flag" is an option you specify in the command line when building your program. When you use a single command, e.g. g++ foo.cpp -o foo.exe, all your flags are added to the same place (to this single command).
But when you build your program in two steps, e.g.:
g++ foo.cpp -c -o foo.o (compiling)
g++ foo.o -o foo.exe (linking)
you have to know which of the two commands to add a flag to. Those are "compiler flags" and "linker flags" respectively.
Most IDEs will require you to specify compiler and linker flags separately, so even if you use a single command now, it's good to know which flag goes where.
Unless specified otherwise, the order of the flags doesn't matter.
SDL.h: No such file or directory
Or any similar error related to including SDL.h or SDL2/SDL.h.
You need to tell your compiler where to look for SDL.h. It's in the SDL files you've downloaded (see preamble).
Add -Ipath to your compiler flags, where path is the directory where SDL.h is located.
Example: -IC:/Users/HolyBlackCat/Downloads/SDL2-2.0.12/x86_64-w64-mingw32/include/SDL2. Relative paths work too, e.g. -ISDL2-2.0.12/x86_64-w64-mingw32/include/SDL2.
Note that the path will be different depending on how you write the #include:
If you do #include <SDL.h>, then the path should end with .../include/SDL2 (like above). This is the recommended way.
If you do #include <SDL2/SDL.h>, then the path should end with .../include.
Various SDL_main problems
You can get several different errors mentioning SDL_main, such as undefined reference to SDL_main, or conflicting types for 'SDL_main', or number of arguments doesn't match prototype, etc.
You need to have a main function. Your main function must look like int main(int, char **). NOT int main() and NOT void main(). This is a quirk of SDL2, related to it doing #define main SDL_main.
Adding parameter names is allowed (and is mandatory in C), e.g. int main(int argc, char **argv). Also the second parameter can be written as char *[] or with a name: char *argv[]. No other changes are allowed.
If your project has multiple source files, make sure to include SDL.h in the file that defines the main function, even if it doesn't otherwise use SDL directly.
Try to avoid #define SDL_MAIN_HANDLED or #undef main when solving this issue, see preamble for explanation.
undefined reference to various functions
• undefined reference to SDL_...
The error message will mention various SDL_... functions, and/or WinMain. If it mentions SDL_main, consult the section "Various SDL_main problems" above. If the function names don't start with SDL_, consult the section "undefined reference to other functions" below.
You need to add following linker flags: -lmingw32 -lSDL2main -lSDL2 -Lpath, where path is the directory where libSDL2.dll.a and libSDL2main.a (which you've downloaded) are located. The order of the -l... flags matters. They must appear AFTER any .c/.cpp/.o files.
Example: -LC:/Users/HolyBlackCat/Desktop/SDL2-2.0.12/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib. Relative paths work too, e.g. -LSDL2-2.0.12/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib.
When you use -l???, the linker will look for a file called lib???.dll.a or lib???.a (and some other variants), which is why we need to pass the location of those files. libmingw32.a (corresponding to -lmingw32) is shipped with your compiler, so it already knows where to find it.
I added all those flags and nothing changed, or I'm getting skipping incompatible X when searching for Y:
You probably use the wrong SDL .a files. The archive you downloaded contains two sets of files: i686-w64-mingw32 (32-bit) and x86_64-w64-mingw32 (64-bit). You must use the files matching your compiler, which can also be either 32-bit or 64-bit.
Print (8*sizeof(void*)) to see if your compiler is 32-bit or 64-bit.
Even if you think you use the right files, try the other ones to be sure.
Some MinGW versions can be switched between 32-bit and 64-bit modes using -m32 and -m64 flags (add them to both compiler and linker flags).
I get undefined reference to a specific function:
• undefined reference to WinMain only
There are several possibilities, all of which were covered in the previous section:
You forgot -lmingw32 and/or -lSDL2main linker flags.
You must use following linker flags, in this exact order, after
any .c/.cpp/.o files: -lmingw32 -lSDL2main -lSDL2
The libSDL2main.a file you use doesn't match your compiler (32-bit file with a 64-bit compiler, or vice versa).
Try to avoid #define SDL_MAIN_HANDLED or #undef main when solving this issue, see preamble for explanation.
• undefined reference to SDL_main only
See the section "Various SDL_main problems" above.
• undefined reference to other functions
Your linker found and used libSDL2.a, but it should be finding and using libSDL2.dll.a. When both are available, it prefers the latter by default, meaning you didn't copy the latter to the directory you passed to -L.
If you intended to perform static linking, see the section called "How do I distribute my app to others?" below.
Nothing happens when I try run my app
Let's say you try to run your app, and nothing happens. Even if you try to print something at the beginning of main(), it's not printed.
Windows has a nasty habit of not showing some DLL-related errors when the program is started from the console.
If you were running your app from the console (or from an IDE), instead try double-clicking the EXE in the explorer. Most probably you'll now see some DLL-related error; then consult one of the next sections.
??.dll was not found
Copy the .dll mentioned in the error message, and place it next to your .exe.
If the DLL is called SDL2.dll, then it's in the SDL files you've downloaded (see preamble). Be aware that there are two different SDL2.dlls: a 32-bit one (in the i686-w64-mingw32 directory), and a 64-bit one (in x86_64-w64-mingw32). Get the right one, if necessary try both.
Any other DLLs will be in your compiler's bin directory (the directory where gcc.exe is located).
You might need to repeat this process 3-4 times, this is normal.
For an automatic way of determining the needed DLLs, see the next section.
procedure entry point ... could not be located in ... and other cryptic DLL errors
Your program needs several .dlls to run, and it found a wrong version of one, left over from some other program you have installed.
It looks for DLLs in several different places, but the directory with the .exe has the most priority.
You should copy all DLLs your program uses (except the system ones) into the directory where your .exe is located.
A reliable way to get a list of needed DLLs is to blindly copy a bunch of DLLs, and then remove the ones that turn out to be unnecessary:
Copy SDL2.dll. It's in the SDL files you've downloaded (see preamble). Be aware that there are two different SDL2.dlls: a 32-bit one (in the i686-w64-mingw32 directory), and a 64-bit one (in x86_64-w64-mingw32). Get the right one, if necessary try both.
Copy all DLLs from your compiler's bin directory (the directory where gcc.exe is located).
Now your program should run, but we're not done yet.
Download NTLDD (or some other program that displays a list of used DLLs). Run ntldd -R your_program.exe.
Any DLL not mentioned in its output should be removed from the current directory. Your program uses everything that remains.
I ended up with following DLLs, expect something similar: SDL2.dll, libgcc_s_seh-1.dll, libstdc++-6.dll (C++ only), libwinpthread-1.dll.
Can I determine the needed DLLs without copying excessive ones?
Yes, but it's less reliable.
Your program searches for DLLs in following locations, in this order:
The directory where your .exe is located.
C:\Windows, including some of its subdirectories.
The directories listed in PATH.
Assuming you (or some jank installer) didn't put any custom DLLs into C:\Windows, adding your compiler's bin directory to the PATH (preferably as the first entry) and either putting SDL2.dll in the same directory as the .exe or into some directory in the PATH should be enough for your program to work.
If this works, you can then run ntldd without copying any DLLs beforehand, and copy only the necessary ones. The reason why you'd want to copy them at all at this point (since your app already works) is to be able to distribute it to others, without them having to install the compiler for its DLLs. Skip any DLLs located outside of your compiler's bin directory (except for SDL2.dll).
Note that the possibility of having weird DLLs in C:\Windows is real. E.g. Wine tends to put OpenAL32.dll into C:\Windows, so if you try this process with OpenAL on Wine, it will fail. If you're making a sciprt that runs ntldd automatically, prefer copying the DLLs (or at least symlinking them - I heard MSYS2 can emulate symlinks on Windows?).
Can I make an EXE that doesn't depend on any DLLs?
It's possible to make an .exe that doesn't depend on any (non-system) .dlls by using the -static linker flag, this is called "static linking". This is rarely done, and you shouldn't need to do this if you did the above steps correctly. This requires some additional linker flags; they are listed in file ??-w64-mingw32/lib/pkgconfig/sdl2.pc shipped with SDL, in the Libs.private section. Notice that there are two files, for x32 and x64 respectively.
How do I distribute my app to others?
Follow the steps in the previous section, titled procedure entry point ... could not be located in ....
A saner alternative?
There is MSYS2.
It has a package manager that lets you download prebuilt libraries, and, as a bonus, a fresh version of the compiler.
Install SDL2 from its package manager. Use a tool called pkg-config (also from the package manager) to automatically determine all necessary flags (pkg-config --cflags SDL2 for compiler flags, pkg-config --libs SDL2 for linker flags).
This is the same experience as you would have on Linux (maybe except for some DLL management hassle).
Bonus - Other problems
Q: My program always opens a console window when I run it, how do I hide it?
A: Add -mwindows to the linker flags.
Q: I get error 'SDL_VideoMode' wasn't declared in this scope.
A: SDL_VideoMode is from SDL1.2, it's not a part of the newer SDL2. Your code was written for the outdated version of SDL. Find a better tutorial that deals specifically with SDL2.
Q: My program has the default file icon, but I want a custom one.
A: Your icon must be in the .ico format. If your graphics editor doesn't support it, make a series of .pngs of common sizes (e.g. 16x16, 32x32, 48x48, 64x64), then convert them to a single .ico using ImageMagick: magick *.png result.ico (or with convert instead of magick).
Create a file with the .rc extension (say, icon.rc), with following contents MyIconName ICON "icon.ico" (where MyIconName is an arbitrary name, and "icon.ico" is the path to the icon). Convert the file to an .o using windres -O res -i icon.rc -o icon.o (the windres program is shipped with your compiler). Specify the resulting .o file when linking, e.g. g++ foo.cpp icon.o -o foo.exe.
Recent versions of SDL2 have a nice property of using the same icon as the window icon, so you don't have to use SDL_SetWindowIcon.
A solution for Visual Studio:
Why not use a package manager? I use vcpkg, and it makes super easy to consume 3rd party libraries. Grab the vcpkg source, and extract it to a safe place, like C:/, then run its bootstrap script bootstrap-vcpkg.bat, this will generate vcpkg executable. Then run vcpkg integrate install to make libraries installed with vcpkg available in Visual Studio.
Search for the library you need:
vcpkg search sdl
imgui[sdl2-binding] Make available SDL2 binding
libwebp[vwebp-sdl] Build the vwebp viewer tool.
magnum[sdl2application] Sdl2Application library
sdl1 1.2.15#12 Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to p...
sdl1-net 1.2.8-3 Networking library for SDL
sdl2 2.0.12-1 Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform
...
Install it with: vcpkg install sdl2.
Now you just need include SDL2 headers, and everything will work out of the box. The library will be linked automatically.
You can learn more about vcpkg here.
On Mac this is what I follow for XCode (must install g++):
sdl linking:
g++ main.cpp -o main $(sdl2-config --cflags --libs)
XCODE project steps:
open terminal app (macOS)
BUILD SETTINGS (select 'all' and 'combined' search bar enter: "search")
click on "header search paths(way right side click)
add: /usr/local/include
BUILD PHASES --> LINK BINARY LIBRARIES (click plus)
type in SDL --> click "add other"
press: command+SHIFT+g (to bring search bar)
type in: usr/local/Cellar
navigate to: SDL2 -->2.0.8 -->lib --> libSDL2-2.2.0.dylib (make sure not shortcut)
How can I get the Watcom compiler (the forked version 2.0 beta which runs on 64-bit hosts) to output 8086 assembly source code in an ASM file? Running wcc -0 main.c from the command prompt produces just the OBJ file.
As a side note, my main task it to convert C source code to assembly code that I can run with EMU8086 (instead of writing the actual assembly code). I am hoping the ASM file generated by Watcom would run without modification (copy-paste) in EMU8086.
I don't see a way to get the Watcom compiler to generate an ASM file directly, but you should be able to use the Watcom disassembler (wdis) to generate an assembly listing from the object file produced by the compiler. In this case you would run something like wdis -l main to read main.obj and produce a file named main.lst that contains an assembly language listing.
If you recompile main.c with a -d1 or -d2 option to place extra debugging data into the main.obj file then you can use the disassembler's -s option to have the assembly language listing interpersed with comments showing the original C source from main.c.
To get the disassembler to omit descriptive comments and just give a plain disassembly that should be acceptable as a source file for the Watcom assembler, give the -a option to the disassembler. This option will also causes the disassembler's output to be written into main.asm rather than main.lst. Sorry, I have no idea whether this output will be directly consumable by EMU8086.
This is all discussed in the Open Watcom C/C++ User Guide and C/C++ Tools User Guide linked from http://www.openwatcom.com/doc.php
I wanted to debug printf function, so when I step inside the printf function (gdb debugger) it showed me this:
__printf (format=0x80484d0 " my name is Adam") at printf.c:28
28 printf.c: No such file or directory.
What is the meaning of this?
And when I again started step then there are a lot more statements like this.
Please help me to understand this.
I think it's pretty clear. There is a place where the gdb expects the source code to be, so download glibc's source code and put it there. I think the error message contains the full path.
If it's a linux distro it's fairly simple in fact because usually source packages are shipped too. Otherwise you need to find the source code yourself, note that it MUST be exactly the same that was used to compile the c library components, not just the same version because distributors often make changes to the sources.
Well, for the debugger to show you the code that was compiled into the binaries you're using, you need the original code somewhere.
You don't seem to have that, so your debugger can't find it.
Notice that you usually do not want to debug the source code of your std library functions, but only the way they are being called. For that, the usual "debug symbol" packages of your operating systems are optimal.
As others have answered, GDB was unable to find the source file.
For the C runtime libraries, Linux distributions may provide a debuginfo RPM that you can install, which may allow GDB to view the files. For example:
$ yum search glibc-debuginfo
...
glibc-debuginfo.x86_64 : Debug information for package glibc
glibc-debuginfo-common.x86_64 : Debug information for package glibc
...
The glibc package and the glibc-debuginfo are a matched pair. There is no explicit dependency, but glibc-debuginfo package won't work unless it is matched with the same version of glibc.
If you have the sources unpacked somewhere, but not where GDB is expecting them to be, you can attempt to use either the directory or the set substitute-path command to let GDB know where the sources are.
The directory command tells GDB to prepend a prefix ahead of any source file path it is attempting to find. For example, if the source tree is actually located under the /tmp, you could use:
(gdb) directory /tmp
The set substitute-path command is used to tell GDB to replace a matching prefix in a source file path with a different path prefix. For example, if the compiled source file was in /build/path/source.c, but in debugging the source file is actually in /usr/home/alice/release-1.1/source.c, then you could use:
(gdb) set substitute-path /build/path /usr/home/alice/release-1.1
The command assumes that you are only specifying a complete path names, so it won't perform the substitution on /build/pathological/source.c.
I'm trying to debug some additions I made to a fairly large c program using gdb. The program I'm trying to debug makes extensive use of #define statements to set different values that are used throughout the code. I need to be able to see what these values are in order to help my debugging (as they include some very important information.
After some digging around I found that the info macro FOO and macro expand FOO commands should be able to print these values if the -g3 option (also tried the -gdwarf-2 and -ggdb3 flags as well) is passed to the compiler (as discussed here). However, whenever I try using this I get
The symbol `FOO' has no definition as a C/C++ preprocessor macro
at <user-defined>:-1
Now, I'm sure that the macro is defined otherwise the previous line of code would not have been able to run. In addition, I'm certain that I have passed the -g3 flag to the compiler. I have one idea as to where the issue might be and that is the location that the macro is defined at. Currently the macro is defined in a header file that is not in the same directory as the rest of the files (i.e. if the source files are in /foo/bar/blam/.. then the macro is defined in /def/mac/here/. Given this I thought maybe the problem was that gdb didn't know to look in this directory so I tried issuing the directory command in gdb and gave it the path to the directory containing the header file (base on this). This still did not solve the problem.
Does anyone know how I can get the values of these macros? If it is pertinent I'm running gdb version 7.11 and compiling the program using
cc and gcc both with Apple LLVM version 7.0.2 (clang-700.1.81). Also, gdb was installed/built using homebrew.
I have looked through both the CodeBlocks and MinGW FAQ and wiki to no avail. As stated above I am a noob.
I want CodeBlocks to act like a Unix compiler in that it overwrites a single output file every time it compiles unless told to do otherwise.
In Unix:
[cc example.c] -> [a.out], [cc example2.c] -> [a.out]. If I want to save the output file from being overwritten i just [cc -o newname example3.c] - [newname.out].
If this is possible with CodeBlocks/MinGW on XP I'd like to know how to do it. If not I would appreciate recommendations for another GUI compiler/IDE that could. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.
I want CodeBlocks to act like a Unix
compiler in that it overwrites..
First of all, C::B isn't a compiler -- it's an IDE. Saying you want C::B to act like a compiler makes no more sense then saying you want vim, emacs, or visual studio to 'act' like a compiler.
Second, you change the name of the final executable by right-clicking a project in your workspace. Goto properties->Build targets tab->select which build target you want to change. On the right side of this you'll see Output filename. Enter the executable filename the linker should output here. Alternatively, you can just navigate to the location of your existing executable and just rename it to something else.
And thirdly, chances are you're not even going to be checking back on this site so I'm probably just wasting my time giving an answer to your post.