Typically, when I create a program (I have only made a few very simple ones so far) I compile the program into a standalone EXE. Most programs that are distributed nowadays have many exes, dlls, and other files that are installed when you first download the program. Is this wrong to be compiling my programs into standalone EXEs? What are some advantages/disadvantages to a standalone vs multifile program?
The only possible thing I can think of is for updating and fixes, because then instead of having to download a 100MB file and overwrite all user settings data, etc. you can simply download maybe a 400kb file that only replaces the files that need to be fixed.
DLL files are library files. If you are not using any functions from a library, then the DLL files will not be included with your program. Having multiple EXE files are generally a way to break a larger program down into smaller, more maintainable units.
If you're just getting started, this is not something you'll need to worry about just yet. One day, when you're working on a larger project that involves using other pre-built components, you'll dig around in your build folder and notice that you also have some DLL files and other resources.
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A small project is in a big project. The small project that can be compiled with make only uses a small part of the files of this big project. Are there any tools that can automatically extract all the source code and header files that this small project depends on? Manually picking is definitely feasible, but it is inefficient and error-prone since the Makefiles are complex and deeply-nested. Modern IDEs usually build indexes, and I don't know if any IDEs provide this feature of extracting all dependencies.
I ended up using the Process Monitor tool to track and filter all the OpenFile system calls of the build system on Windows, then exported the report and wrote a script to copy the files. But such an approach is not so elegant >_<
The title basically says it all. It might be a dumb question (which probably is) because I am entirely new to programming. I wonder how the desktop apps we use are made of mostly .dll files when you check their program files, but not even a single source code file? Is there any way to open them, or how can I turn my code file into .dll?
Thats exactly what DLL files are. DLL files are libraries which contain code that is called by the 'main' source code, which is compiled into '.exe' files.
You not being able to see such code is intended by its owner, unless the source itself is released alongside the compiled software. A project may integrate .dll files already developed by someone else instead of developing them from scratch.
As to how to turn your code into a .dll, it would depend on the language you are developing in.
More detailed answers at: What exactly are DLL files, and how do they work?
Short answer: The DLL files are "compiled".
Compiled files no longer rely on their source code. Once compiled they can be executed by the operating system directly.
DLL files are not "scripts". In languages like HTML, Javascript and PHP, the files are interpreted at run time by the browser's HTML or Java engine or the PHP engine on a server. Thus you can also read them since they are not yet compiled. But in the case of a DLL file, the original source code files have been compiled (interpreted and converted) and the result is an executable Library which is used by another program to accomplish whatever tasks are in them.
It is possible to "decompile" them with a decompiler, but that will not give you the original source code, any more than a "jpg" will give you the original layered Photoshop file. All you have is the Result.
I'm a student at an university and currently tasked to do a project of any kind but resticted to using C. I chose to make a video games using allegro5 because it has all the function I need to fulfil my project. I managed to set up the library (I set up build option in the .cbp file) so that it would work for me and currently finishing the program itself. The problem is that, if I send my work to any other person, the allegro library doesn't link up and fails to start up the program. Also, when I try to start .exe file to launch the project on my own device, it also fails to link up. If this makes any sense, I need some advice with linking libraries so that anyone could launch the game from there devices without the need to setup allegro.
Thanks in advance!
You need to copy certain .dll files with your exe. If you place the .dll files in the same folder as your .exe, then it should work on other machines.
Which .dll files you ask? Well that depends on the exact variant of allegro that you got. There are variants, such as allegro_monolith-5.2.dll or allegro_monolith-5.2-debug.dll. And these dlls might have dependencies, such as zlib1.dll, libpng16-16.dll and others.
The dependencywalker tool can help you decide which dlls you need.
i want to compile a 'c' code and create an executable from my application. as of now i do it by specifying the path of my compilation .exe (c++) present in the bin folder of my Dev-Cpp folder.
it works fine but i need to pack the compiler along with the application so i wanted to know what files and folders are needed so that i can compile it directly from the application.
what are the files needed exactly i.e. headers,the compilation application, libs and what else...
any help?
If you're asking how to create and distribute a project which is able to build upon an existing compiler for its functionality, there are packages you can find which are just the compiler portion without the IDE. Minimalist GNU for Windows is such a package:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinGW
(In fact, when the people who put together Dev-C++ wrote their integrated development environment, they get the actual compilation functionality from MinGW...which they bundled into their package for good measure. So if you were going to write an IDE of your own, you would start from the MinGW distribution...not by trying to hand-pick files out of Dev-C++.)
One issue to be sensitive to is licensing. While there are not generally any legal issues out of the box regarding distributing executables built with a system like MinGW, when you go as far as to include the compiler in your own "product", it might be tricky. Dev-C++ is under the same license as MinGW (GPL) but I'd imagine there'd be issues if it were not.
If you only need a subset of the full functionality (let's say you only compile C and not C++) there will be a lot of header files and such that you could cut out. But you have to trade off the difficulty of maintaining this sort of optimization vs. just having your program ask users to install MinGW and then tell your program where they installed it. It might take up more space and lead installation to be a two-step process...but frees you from a large number of concerns.
So that's what I would suggest: Have a setting in your program (much like Dev-C++ does) which lets people specify where the MinGW binaries are installed on their system. But let them install it independently.
I managed to create a .deb file from a source program,tar.gz
how can i create an exe file so that the app can also run on windows?i've searched a lot but didnt manage to find any resources.
If you want to run the program under Windows, you'll need to re-compile it from source using a Windows compiler. How exactly to re-compile it will differ from program to program. Check the program's documentation for details or ask its maintainer. ".deb" files and anything else related to Linux package managers have no meaning in Windows, so you'll need to extract the source from the source .deb or pull it from the appropriate source repository.
Be aware that many Linux programs won't build for Windows with a simple recompile alone. If they use any external libraries, then those libraries need to be available for Windows as well. The Cygwin environment may help here. If there isn't already an official procedure for building that particular program under Windows, then you may have to do the porting work yourself (which is a large enough task that it's well outside the scope of this question).