Distribute a program compiled with MinGW g++

Question

Let\'s say I have created and compiled a simple program using the MinGW 64 (g++ compiler). Running this program on my computer and looking in Process Explorer for what DLL f

Answer 1

There are several major challenges to distributing compiled software:

1. Compiling the code for all target processors (remember, when it comes to compiled code, you need to produce separate downloads/distributions for each type of instruction set architecture).

2. Ensuring that the builds are reproducible, consistent, and can be easily correlated with a specific version of the code (and versions of the dependencies).

3. Ensuring that the build output is self-contained and includes all of its dependencies within it (so that it is not dependent on any other installations that happen to exist on just your system).

4. Making sure that your code is built and distributed regularly, with updates distributed automatically so that -- in the event of security issues -- you can push out new patched versions.

For convenience and to increase reach, it is nice for non-savvy users to have a prebuilt version that they can install. However, I would recommend sharing the source code as a first step.

Most of these requirements are fairly non-trivial to hit and often require automating not only build process, but also automating the instantiation / configuration of VMs in which the build should take place. However, there are open source projects that can help... for example, check out Gitian.

In terms of bullet point #3, the key thing here is to use static linking... while this does make the binary you distribute much larger (because its dependencies are now baked into the output), it also makes your binary isolated from the version of the libraries on the system (avoiding "dependency hell").

Point #4 is very tricky, but thankfully there are also opensource tools to help here, as well such as cloudup, which provides a way to add auto-updating capability to your application distribution.