## Compiling GLib Applications

Compiling GLib Applications — How to compile your GLib application

## Compiling GLib Applications on UNIX

To compile a GLib application, you need to tell the compiler where to find the GLib header files and libraries. This is done with the pkg-config utility.

The following interactive shell session demonstrates how pkg-config is used (the actual output on your system may be different):

    $ pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0
     -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include
    $ pkg-config --libs glib-2.0
     -L/usr/lib -lm -lglib-2.0

See the pkg-config website for more information about pkg-config.

If your application uses or GObject features, it must be compiled and linked with the options returned by the following pkg-config invocation:

    $ pkg-config --cflags --libs gobject-2.0

If your application uses modules, it must be compiled and linked with the options returned by one of the following pkg-config invocations:

    $ pkg-config --cflags --libs gmodule-no-export-2.0
    $ pkg-config --cflags --libs gmodule-2.0

The difference between the two is that gmodule-2.0 adds `--export-dynamic` to the linker flags, which is often not needed.

The simplest way to compile a program is to use the "backticks" feature of the shell. If you enclose a command in backticks (not single quotes), then its output will be substituted into the command line before execution. So to compile a GLib Hello, World, you would type the following:

    $ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs glib-2.0` hello.c -o hello

Deprecated GLib functions are annotated to make the compiler emit warnings when they are used (e.g. with gcc, you need to use the -Wdeprecated-declarations option). If these warnings are problematic, they can be turned off by defining the preprocessor symbol GLIB_DISABLE_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS by using the commandline option `-DGLIB_DISABLE_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS`

If you want to make really sure that your program doesn't use any deprecated functions, you can define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_DEPRECATED by using the commandline option `-DG_DISABLE_DEPRECATED`. This will hide deprecated API from the compiler entirely, most likely causing your program's build to fail.

The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the toplevel headers `glib.h`, `glib-object.h`, `gio.h`. Still, there are some exceptions; these headers have to be included separately: `gmodule.h`, `glib-unix.h`, `glib/gi18n-lib.h` or `glib/gi18n.h` (see the Internationalization section), `glib/gprintf.h` and `glib/gstdio.h` (we don't want to pull in all of stdio).

Starting with 2.32, GLib enforces this by generating an error when individual headers are directly included.