Compiling GLib Applications on UNIX

To compile a GLib application, you need to tell the compiler where to find the GLib header files and libraries. This is done with the pkg-config utility.

The following interactive shell session demonstrates how pkg-config is used (the actual output on your system may be different):

$ pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0
 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include 
$ pkg-config --libs glib-2.0
 -L/usr/lib -lm -lglib-2.0  

If your application uses threads or GObject features, it must be compiled and linked with the options returned by the following pkg-config invocations:

$ pkg-config --cflags --libs gthread-2.0
$ pkg-config --cflags --libs gobject-2.0

If your application uses modules, it must be compiled and linked with the options returned by one of the following pkg-config invocations:

$ pkg-config --cflags --libs gmodule-no-export-2.0 
$ pkg-config --cflags --libs gmodule-2.0 

The difference between the two is that gmodule-2.0 adds --export-dynamic to the linker flags, which is often not needed.

The simplest way to compile a program is to use the "backticks" feature of the shell. If you enclose a command in backticks (not single quotes), then its output will be substituted into the command line before execution. So to compile a GLib Hello, World, you would type the following:

$ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs glib-2.0` hello.c -o hello

If you want to make sure that your program doesn't use any deprecated functions, you can define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_DEPRECATED by using the command line option -DG_DISABLE_DEPRECATED=1.