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GettingStarted.md

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Getting started

From an higher level overview, CppSharp will take a bunch of user-provided C/C++ headers and generate either C++/CLI or C# code that can be compiled into a regular .NET assembly.

To get started you can either compile from source or get one of the pre-compiled binary releases:

Building from source

Common setup

  1. Clone CppSharp Git repository
  2. Generate build files
  3. Build the source code
  4. Generate bindings

Pre-requisites

LLVM is a core dependency of CppSharp.

By default, the build.sh command will automatically download a pre-built binary LLVM package compatible with your system and version of CppSharp (the same ones we use for all our continuous integration (CI) builds).

Or you can choose to build LLVM and Clang from source if you prefer, please check the LLVM documentation page for more information.

The build scripts also depend on curl command and 7-Zip on Windows, so please make sure those are installed on your system.

Compiling on Windows/Visual Studio

The following steps should be called from the VS developer command prompt.

  1. Generate the VS solution

    cd <CppSharp>\build
<sh> build.sh generate -configuration Release -platform x64

ℹ️ You can use the -target-framework option to target any valid .NET target framework.

  1. Compile the VS projects

    You can open CppSharp.sln and hit F5 or compile via the command line:

    <sh> build.sh -configuration Release -platform x64

Building in Release is recommended because else we will use the Clang parser debug configuration, which will be too slow for practical use beyond debugging.

The solution generated will be for Visual Studio 2019.

If you have a more recent version of Visual Studio, you can either:

  • install Visual Studio 2019
  • install Visual Studio 2019 build tools, from Visual Studio Installer
    • select the payload MSVC v142 - VS 2019 C++ x64/x86 build tools (v14.29-16.11)

Please note that Windows isn't natively able to run sh scripts, to remediate this, you can either:

  • use the one from Visual Studio if present
    • e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\Git\usr\bin\sh.exe
  • use the one from Git for Windows
    • e.g. C:\Program Files\Git\bin\sh.exe

When opening the solution for the first time on a more recent version than Visual Studio 2019, you will be prompted to retarget projects to one of the platform toolset available on your system.

Compiling on macOS or Linux

  1. Generate the VS solution and makefiles

    cd <CppSharp>\build
./build.sh generate -configuration Release -platform x64

ℹ️ You can use the -target-framework option to target any valid .NET target framework.

  1. Compile the csproj files and makefiles

    ./build.sh -configuration Release -platform x64

If the above script fails, you can try these equivalent manual steps:

  1. Build the generated makefiles:

    make -C gmake config=release_x64

  2. Build the generated VS solution:

    msbuild CppSharp.sln -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=x64

If you need more verbosity from the builds invoke make and msbuild as:

make -C gmake config=release_x64 verbose=true
msbuild CppSharp.sln -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=x64 -verbosity:detailed

Running the testsuite

  1. Change directory to <CppSharp>\build
  2. Run ./test.sh to run the tests.

Linux notes

Only 64-bits builds are supported.

Generating bindings

You can now progress to generating your first bindings, explained in our Generating bindings page.