How to statically compile an SDL game on Windows

Question

I have been trying to produce a statically linked "single binary" version of my game for windows. I want to link with sdl, sdl_image and sdl_mixer which in turn pull in a few support libraries. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to get them all to compile and link using cygwin/mingw/gcc. As far as I can tell all existing public versions are only shared libraries / dlls.

Please note that I'm not talking about licencing here. The source will be open thus the GPL/LGPLness of sdl is not relevant.

Answer 1

When compiling your project, you need to make just a couple changes to your makefile.

• Instead of sdl-config --libs, use sdl-config --static-libs
• Surround the use of the above-mentioned sdl-config --static-libs with -Wl,-Bstatic and -Wl,-Bdynamic. This tells GCC to force static linking, but only for the libraries specified between them.

If your makefile currently looks like:

SDLLIBS=`sdl-config --libs`

Change it to:

SDLLIBS=-Wl,-Bstatic `sdl-config --static-libs` -Wl,-Bdynamic

These are actually the same things you should do on Unix-like systems, but it usually doesn't cause as many errors on Unix-likes if you use the simpler -static flag to GCC, like it does on Windows.

Answer 2

Via this SDL mailing list post it seems that the sdl development tools ship with a sdl-config script that you can use with the --static-libs flag to determine what linker flags you need to use.

Answer 3

Environment: VMWare Virtual Machine with Windows 7 x64 and Equipment we Dev c + + build 7.4.2.569, complilador g+ + (tdm-1) 4.6.1

Once, SDL2-2.0.3 API installed as configuration Dev c ++ is not very clear what I've done as tradition requires command line.

The first problem is that Windows 7 appears to have changed the methodology and they go to his ball. Inventory. Ref. https://stackoverflow.com/users/464581/cheers-and-hth-alf

After the first hurdle, SDL_platform.h is that bad, it's down another, I do not remember where I downloaded, but the next does not work in the indicated version.

We must put SDL2.h ls in the directory of the executable.

D:\prg_desa\zsdl2>g++ bar.cpp main.cpp -o pepe1 -ID:\SDL2-2.0.3\i686-w64-mingw32\include\SDL2 -LD:\SDL2-2.0.3\i686-w64-mingw32\lib -lmingw32 -lSDL2main -lSDL2 -mwindow

I've finally compiled and works SDL2 testing.