Building DALi library for Windows

Aug 5, 2020 • dali

Since I left Mozilla I came back to my old days as a C/C++ developer. One of the projects I am working on is porting the Tizen.NUI API to Windows. Tizen.NUI itself is written in C#, so it doesn’t require any major effort to run on Windows, but it is heavily based on DALi, and there where the job lies. DALi kind of works on Windows already, but I caught several bugs affecting 64 bits. You can refer to the pull requests to get details on what was wrong.

DALi, doesn’t belong to a single repo, actually. On top of dali-core we have dali-adaptor and dali-toolkit, not to mention the sample applications. This post is a step by step guide to build DALi on Windows.

Dependencies

To build and install DALi you will need:

Visual Studio 2019 (Community Edition is fine)
git
vcpkg

Building Windows dependencies

After the dependencies installed, you need the windows-dependencies repository. Run the following commands in a subfolder that will host the DALi repos:

C:\DALi>git clone https://github.com/dalihub/windows-dependencies
C:\DALi>set VCPKG_FOLDER=C:\DALi
C:\DALi>set DALI_ENV_FOLDER=C:\DALi\dali-env
C:\DALi>cd windows-dependencies\build
C:\DALi\windows-dependencies\build>mkdir build
C:\DALi\windows-dependencies\build>cd build
C:\DALi\windows-dependencies\build\build>cmake -g Ninja . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=%VCPKG_FOLDER%/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%DALI_ENV_FOLDER% ..
C:\DALi\windows-dependencies\build\build>cmake --build . --target install

DALI_ENV_FOLDER is the output directory where the artifacts generated are installed.

Building the DALi libraries

Building the DALi libraries (dali-core, dali-adaptor and dali-toolkit) is straightforward and the README of each library describes the steps in more detail. Here I am just giving you the sequence of commands to build them. If you want to know more details, you can refer to each library documentation.

dali-core

C:\DALi>git clone https://github.com/dalihub/dali-core/
C:\DALi>cd dali-core\build\tizen
C:\DALi\dali-core\build\tizen>mkdir build
C:\DALi\dali-core\build\tizen>cd build
C:\DALi\dali-core\build\tizen\build>cmake -g Ninja . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=%VCPKG_FOLDER%/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DENABLE_PKG_CONFIGURE=OFF -DENABLE_LINK_TEST=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%DALI_ENV_FOLDER% -DINSTALL_CMAKE_MODULES=ON -Wno-dev ..
C:\DALi\dali-core\build\tizen\build>cmake --build . --target install

dali-adaptor

C:\DALi>%VCPKG_FOLDER%\vcpkg\vcpkg.exe install pthreads:x64-windows
C:\DALi>git clone https://github.com/dalihub/dali-adaptor/
C:\DALi>cd dali-adaptor\build\tizen
C:\DALi\dali-adaptor\build\tizen>mkdir build
C:\DALi\dali-adaptor\build\tizen>cd build
C:\DALi\dali-adaptor\build\tizen\build>cmake -g Ninja . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=%VCPKG_FOLDER%/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DENABLE_PKG_CONFIGURE=OFF -DENABLE_LINK_TEST=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%DALI_ENV_FOLDER% -DINSTALL_CMAKE_MODULES=ON -DPROFILE_LCASE=windows -Wno-dev ..
C:\DALi\dali-adaptor\build\tizen\build>cmake --build . --target install

dali-toolkit

C:\DALi>git clone https://github.com/dalihub/dali-toolkit/
C:\DALi>cd dali-toolkit\build\tizen
C:\DALi\dali-toolkit\build\tizen>mkdir build
C:\DALi\dali-toolkit\build\tizen>cd build
C:\DALi\dali-toolkit\build\tizen\build>cmake -g Ninja . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=%VCPKG_FOLDER%/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DENABLE_PKG_CONFIGURE=OFF -DENABLE_LINK_TEST=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%DALI_ENV_FOLDER% -DINSTALL_CMAKE_MODULES=ON -DUSE_DEFAULT_RESOURCE_DIR=ON -Wno-dev ..
C:\DALi\dali-toolkit\build\tizen\build>cmake --build . --target install

dali-demo

dali-demo contains a series of sample applications that you can try to test if your installation is ok. The procedure to build and install these apps are the same as for the libraries:

C:\DALi>git clone https://github.com/dalihub/dali-demo/
C:\DALi>cd dali-demo\build\tizen
C:\DALi\dali-demo\build\tizen>mkdir build
C:\DALi\dali-demo\build\tizen>cd build
C:\DALi\dali-demo\build\tizen>cmake -g Ninja . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=%VCPKG_FOLDER%/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DENABLE_PKG_CONFIGURE=OFF -DINTERNATIONALIZATION=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%DALI_ENV_FOLDER% -Wno-dev ..
C:\DALi\dali-demo\build\tizen\build>cmake --build . --target install

Running

If everything was ok, your binaries should reside inside inside the DALI_ENV_FOLDER directory.

DALi depends on libANGLE, an OpenGL ES library that translates OpenGL calls to one of several supported backends. On Windows, the default backend is Direct3D 11. I was having problems with the D3D11 backend on my machine when trying to run the DALi sample applications. What I did was build libANGLE disabling the D3D11 backend, falling back to Direct X 9. The build instructions tell how to disable the D3D11 backend.

With all set, you can run a sample application:

C:\DALi\dali-env\bin>hello-world.example.exe

On the day I write this post, I have some patches merged in the DALi repos and others are pending to review. If you are experiencing crashes you may want to give a look at the open pull requests and apply some of them.