dlrCommon Utility Library

Introduction

This library is the foundation for all of the other libraries in the dlr_libs collection. It provides classes for working with exceptions, reference counting, portable numeric types with known precision, byte order, and more. The current version number is shown in file VERSION.TXT, and recent changes can be seen in the file RELEASE_NOTES.TXT.

Contact

Bugfixes and patches welcome! Please see the file LICENSE.TXT in this directory for up-to-date contact information.

License

Please see the file LICENSE.TXT in this directory.

Platform

This library is in regular use under Linux (32- & 64-bit), and not-so-regular use under Windows (32-bit). It should be portable to any platform supporting ISO C++.

Status

This is a reasonably stable library. Efforts will be made to maintain a consistent interface, and not break existing code.

Dependencies

You should be able to build this library without installing any additional packages.

Installation

Visual Studio

If you're building under Visual C++, load the solution file:

./visualc/dlrCommon.sln

Building this file will put libraries in

"C:\Program Files\dlr_libs\{Release,Debug}"

and put include files in

"C:\Program Files\dlr_libs\include"

You can override these default installation locations from within visual studio. Note that if you do so, you'll also have to update the build files for any other libraries in the dlr_libs suite so that they know where to find the installed dlrCommon files.

NOTE: Microsoft's compiler considers much of the C++ Standard Library to be deprecated. Building this code under recent versions of VC++ generates lots of warnings telling you to use the use the confusingly named "Safe Standard C++ Library," which isn't standard at all, and as far as I know isn't portable to any other platforms. It's possible to disable these warnings. I encourage you to do so by adding "/D_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE" and "/D_SCL_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE" to the compiler command line via the "properties" dialog for the .vcproj file within Visual Studio. I've done this for the .vcproj files included with dlr_libs, but you may find these warnings popping up in your own code when you include dlr_libs header files. Don't be fooled.

Please be aware that I hardly ever use windows, so the .sln/.vcproj files are usually a little out of date. I occasionally check that friends who use these libraries under windows are still happy, but I don't get patches too often. Let me know if you have any trouble, and please feel free to email with updates. Also note that the .vcproj files are all configured to build multi-threaded code. This may cause some trouble if you're linking with projects that use single threaded code. See the code generation page of the project properties dialog to change this.

GNU Autotools

On every other platform, building and installing is done via GNU Autotools. If you're building from a tarball, the simplest possible version looks like this:

> tar -xvf dlrcommon-x.y.z.tar.gz
> cd dlrcommon-x.y.z
> ./configure
> make
> make install

If you're using the source files from subversion, you need to add a step:

> [get source from svn]
> ./bootstrap
> ./configure
> make
> make install

Of course, you may want to specify an installation directory:

> [get source from cvs and run ./bootstrap, or unpack tarball]
> ./configure --prefix=/home/jfisher/software
> make
> make install

Or some compiler options:

> [get source from cvs and run ./bootstrap, or unpack tarball]
> env CXXFLAGS="-g -Wall" ./configure \
    --prefix=/home/jfisher/software
> make
> make install

For more information on configure options:

> ./configure --help

Thanks, David LaRose