First eepp project problem

[SideFx]

I'm on Windows arm64, using the MSYS2 clangarm64 kit. I successfully compiled eepp and all the examples.
Since I'm completely lost in premake (if there's something like the --prefix option), I manually copied the following:

• includes to /clangarm64/include/eepp
• *.lib to /clangarm64/lib (also the third party ones)
• *.dll to /clangarm64/bin

Now I wanted to rebuild the UI-Hello_World example in CLion using cmake.
The project compiled fine, but when I ran the exe the window did show up for a short time (without content) then shut down. So, certainly I'm missing something. Here's my CMakeLists.txt file:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 4.1)
project(UI_HelloWorld)

set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 20)

add_executable(UI_HelloWorld main.cpp)

target_link_libraries(UI_HelloWorld PRIVATE
eepp
stdc++
pthread
)

target_link_options(UI_HelloWorld PRIVATE
-mwindows
-s
)

Either I did something terribly wrong when installing eepp into /clangarm64 or my CMakeLists.txt is incomplete.
Please guide me into the right direction :)

[SpartanJ]

Hi!
Thanks for the interest in the project.

I've never been able to verify any Windows + arm64 build so it might not work out of the box (I do not have the hardware for testing it properly), but I can make a some comments and clarifications based on what you described:

• The build does try to add symlinks of the dlls to the bin folder but it's not designed for MSYS clang so I assume that should fail and you'll need to move the eepp.dll manually (and also SDL2.dll!). Also I do not build with clang but it shouldn't a be a problem, several users are using clang to build ecode (eepp project) with no issues.

• The build binaries do work? I mean, the ones that build with the eepp project. I understand that you tried to build yourself with your own CMake script but didn't work, but the project builds that for you.

• My guess is that it did not work because for some reason you seem to need to link against SDL2main (this is only required in VSC builds but the behavior seems to point to that direction).

• Does the ecode build (the code editor based on eepp) open OK for you? It can be downloaded here. This is just to know if actually is building OK, nobody ever confirmed :$

• Also, BTW, you can generate the CMake project of eepp! You can generate them with something like:
  premake5.exe --os=windows --cc=mingw --windows-mingw-build --arch=arm64 cmake, project files will be at make\windows folder.

[SideFx]

Hi SpartanJ,
thank you very much for the quick reply. Well, I'm deeply ashamed to say, the solution was way more simple. All I had to do was to add a CMake post build command to copy the NotoSans font to the "target directory"/assets/fonts folder. Somehow I managed to overlook from where the font is actually loaded.
I can confirm that the library and all the examples compile and run very well under Windows arm64 using MSYS2 clangarm64. All I had to do was to install some gcc compatibility layer (GCC compatibility aliases for Clang) which is part of the tool chain. The OpenGL / Vulkan compatibility pack from the Microsoft store is another intrinsic part.
Anyway, I'll also try to rebuild eepp as a CMake project, as you kindly suggested.
Thanks again.
Best,
Jan

[SpartanJ]

thank you very much for the quick reply

No problem! I'm glad you're taking a look at the project.

Well, I'm deeply ashamed to say, the solution was way more simple. All I had to do was to add a CMake post build command to copy the NotoSans font to the "target directory"/assets/fonts folder. Somehow I managed to overlook from where the font is actually loaded.

Nothing to be ashamed, this is not obvious. I was thinking about adding a fallback font using the default OS font for these kind of cases. But that would go into the UIApplication class, which is the simplest way of initializing the eepp GUI system. You can check the 7guis examples, for example, the counter example which is the simplest of all.

I can confirm that the library and all the examples compile and run very well under Windows arm64 using MSYS2 clangarm64. All I had to do was to install some gcc compatibility layer (GCC compatibility aliases for Clang) which is part of the tool chain. The OpenGL / Vulkan compatibility pack from the Microsoft store is another intrinsic part.

Thanks for the confirmation! You can probably avoid having to install the GCC compatibility layer by just setting CC=clang and CXX=clang++ environment flags, although passing --cc=clang to premake should work too.

Please let me know if I can help you with anything else, the project is not extensively documented and understand that it can be hard to start with. There's some documentation here and that's basically it. I know this is bad but my time is very limited and I'm putting most of my efforts in ecode which is a good reference for the project.