ABOUT

This small, frugal, self-containing (apart from a working MSVC shell, of course) build scaffolding creates "true" static SFML build for MSVC, as opposed to the shipped prebuilt lib versions that still depend on the MSVC (redistributable) runtime DLLs that may or may not be present on a target Windows instance.

IOW, the official SFML/MSVC binaries have been compiled with -MD (and -MDd for DEBUG), whereas this setup builds with -MT (and -MTd) by default. (You can still build for the DLL version of the CRT with bbuild CRT=dll.)

Alternatively (in fact: preferably), if you can use CMake, you should just run (in the repo dir):

cmake -D SFML_OS_WINDOWS=TRUE -D SFML_USE_STATIC_STD_LIBS=TRUE .

or, for DEBUG:

cmake -D SFML_OS_WINDOWS=TRUE -D SFML_USE_STATIC_STD_LIBS=TRUE -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .

then:

nmake

and call it a day. (Note that the stock CMake build will not name the fully static version differently, so you can't have both -MT and -MT libs at the same time!)

For convenience there's

cbuild.cmd

for the above, plus optionally downloading the latest SFML-master snapshot from GitHub.

The rest of the instructions is for building without CMake.

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BEWARE!

This is an experimental proof-of-concept prototype tool for my own personal use, to quickly test integrating "SFML/MT" with some other projects.

The scripts and the makefile have been ripped out of some other existing configurations, where this build setup was already pretty experimental to begin with... :) (I've been test-driving the surprisingly usable built-in make tool of BusyBox-w32.)

So, this stuff here is full of weird remnants and junk -- OTOH, it still worked so well (thanks to the beautifully clean SFML repo, and its general build-friendly qualities, with all the external dependencies prepackaged* etc.) that I've just proceeded to baseline it as "the" build tool for this particular purpose of mine, in the context of my own projects.

Your mileage may vary.

* _{FTR: I actually forgot that SFML comes with batteries included, and I initially downloaded & compiled everything from scratch, individually, fixing issues here and there etc., only to realize after-the-fact that I worked so hard for absolutely nothing... (I have a mild case of ADD, and didn't even realize that the repo already has an extlibs dir! :) )}

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NOTE:

• It's not possible to mix differently compiled object code, so if you want to ensure that your app (or even just a simple static lib) that uses SFML doesn't "secretly" depend on any of the MSVC runtime DLLs, then recompiling SFML from source is your only option.

• The generated static libs with the also static CRT dependency will have an extra -s suffix (in addition to the official one), e.g. sfml-window-s-s.lib or sfml-window-s-s-d.lib. (This scheme simply follows the original logic of "-s for static, nothing for DLL"...)

• The external OpenAL.dll library will still be linked dynamically (no way around that, AFAIK), but at least you can just easily ship that along with your executable (unlike the MSVC Redist. package).

• Only building the 64-bit version is explicitly supported by this guide, but it should be pretty straightforward to do the same for 32-bit, too.

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BUILD STEPS

1. Download and unpack the SFML source repo

https://github.com/SFML/SFML/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

(Note: this should be the latest pre-3.0 branch, very much in flux, but still quite usable and robust, albeit breaking the API occasionally.)

The unpacked repo (should be SFML-master -- adjust the build script if it isn't) is expeted to be in the same dir as the build scripts.

2. One small "fix"...

There's one thing I had to fix there: disable FLAC's assert.h in extlibs\headers\FLAC. It kept failing with assert being an undefined identifier, probably due to the INCLUDE path (ordering) set up by the scripts, and I couldn't quickly find the reason; but strangely enough, just taking that header down fixed it... :-o

3. CRUCIAL: Remove the unused platform sources!

This experimental makefile can't skip directories, and would just want to compile all the C/C++ files it can find in the source tree. So,

ALL THE IRRELEVANT PLATFORM-SPECIFIC SOURCES MUST BE MOVED OUT OF THE WAY MANUALLY!

Fortunately, this is very easy, too: just remove all but the Win32 subdirs under src, namely from:

- Window
- Main
- Network
- System

(or wherever else you may find any).

4. Run bbuild

With no options, it will build a non-debug ("release") version (with -O2 and NDEBUG), against the static MSVC runtime libs (-MT).

Optionally, you can specify CRT=dll to build the original ("half") static SFML libs, or DEBUG=1 for a debug version, e.g.:

bbuild CRT=dll DEBUG=1

would build for the DLL version of th MSVC runtime, with debug info and disabled optimizations.

The generated .lib files are in the lib dir, created inside the repo, so that now it has a compatible layout with the official pre-built packages. (Except the bin dir, as this build tool does not build DLLs. It probably could, but I just didn't bother adding that without a good reason.)

Note: each of the four supported build combinations are built in separate parallel "VPATH" trees, so you can incrementally rebuild them, if you wish, without interference.

5. Create release package [OPTIONAL]

Using the tooling/package.template package skeleton:

Copy the new libs, and -- depending on how standalone and complete you want to make the package -- optionally also include, stuff from extlibs (i.e. libs-msvc-universal and OpenAL.dll from extlibs/bin/... to bin) etc.

Create an empty file with the name VERSION/<SFML-master commit hash>.

Zip it all up with the name SFML-master-vc17-64-staticCRT.zip, and if the debug lib versions go in their own separate sub-addon package, preferably call that one SFML-master-vc17-64-staticCRT-d.zip.

Finally create a new release at https://github.com/x1ab/SFML-staticCRT-build, and upload the new zip files as assets.

NOTE: The packages are linked to at https://github.com/x1ab/x1ab.github.io, hence the strict naming. The current URL of the "canonical" download page:

https://x1ab.github.io/download/SFML/3.0-pre/custom/

6. There's no bbuild clean

Just delete the .build.tmp dir (or only its build-mode specific subtree that you want to fully rebuild).