I'm not really a windows user, but given the latest discussion on the rust subreddit, I thought I give using gtk4-rs on windows a try.
To set up my build environment, I followed this blog post:
That way, I successfully built and installed gtk4/master. And I can launch gtk4-demo.
Building from the tag 4.3.0 didn't work for me, as the source of glib couldn't be checked out.
In the blog above, things got installed to C:\GNOME. I chose C:\GTK instead, but the name doesn't really matter.
I wouldn't use spaces in the name, though.
After that, I've installed then rust/stable via rustup (from https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install):
C:\Users\oleid\src\gtk4-rs>rustup show
Default host: x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
rustup home: C:\Users\leido\.rustup
stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc (default)
rustc 1.52.1 (9bc8c42bb 2021-05-09)
The next tool you need is pkg-config. The build scripts of gtk-rs depend on it.
It would seem the following is a stripped-down version without extra dependencies. Less is more here, so I used it:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pkgconfiglite/files/latest/download
All you need to to is to unpack it and add the executable to your system PATH.
Or unpack it to somee folder which is already searched for executables.
To check if this worked, open x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019 again and type:
C:\SomePath> pkg-config
Must specify package names on the command line
To test if things work, I used the gtk-rs souce. You could create a minimal example as well. If you'd like to build the examples from gtk-rs as I did, do the following:
C:\Users\oleid\src> git clone --recursive https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk4-rs.git
C:\Users\oleid\src> cd gtk4-rs
When simply running cargo run --bin clock compilation will fail. We need to tell the rust bindings where to look for the libraries.
Here, pkg-config comes into play. We need to tell pkg-config where to find the libraries we build before.
C:\Users\oleid\src\gtk4-rs>set PKG_CONFIG_PATH=C:\GTK\lib\pkgconfig
C:\Users\oleid\src\gtk4-rs>pkg-config --libs cairo
-LC:/GTK/lib -lcairo
Now the following command will work:
C:\Users\leido\src\gtk4-rs>cargo build --bin clock
When running, however, the system will complain that the libraries cannot be found.
We can change the path temporarily to make the system find its dependencies:
C:\Users\oleid\src\gtk4-rs>set PATH=%PATH%;C:\GTK\bin
C:\Users\oleid\src\gtk4-rs>cargo run --bin clock
