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.

The recommended way of using GLib has always been to only include the toplevel headers glib.h, glib-object.h, gio.h. Still, there are some exceptions; these headers have to be included separately: gmodule.h, glib/gi18n-lib.h or glib/gi18n.h (see the Internationalization section), glib/gprintf.h and glib/gstdio.h (we don't want to pull in all of stdio).

Starting with 2.17, GLib enforces this by generating an error when individual headers are directly included. To help with the transition, the enforcement is not turned on by default for GLib headers (it is turned on for GObject and GIO). To turn it on, define the preprocessor symbol G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES by using the command line option -DG_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.