Vala Bindings for Native Windows Controls

Though Vala is a quite capable language, when it comes to GUI programming, you don't have a lot of choice, or the choice should I say. The computer I use on a daily basis is a Linux machine with a GNOME desktop environment, so GTK is a reasonable choice for me to use when in need of a GUI toolkit, and I'm happy with that. But when I need to write an application that is supposed to run on Windows, I'd really prefer the look and feel of a native application. Hence the aim of this project is to provide the means of creating a Windows application with the native controls (widgets) using Vala.

Below is a screen shot of the sample application of which you can find the source code here. If you'd like to try it out first, you can download the compiled binary here.

Please Note: For the time being, this project is highly experimental and lacks a lot. I have the intention of building a library out of this eventually, but the progress will be really slow (I really don't have much time.)

Building

The sample application is compiled on Ubuntu 20.04 and tested with Wine. The following instructions explain how to do so on Ubuntu. If you'd like to compile on a Windows machine, you can use MSYS2.

We'll use the C compiler provided by the Mingw-w64 project to cross-compile. You can install the development environment for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows applications by the following command (if you don't have the development tools package installed already, install the build-essential package beforehand):

sudo apt install mingw-w64

after the installation you'll have the following commands at your disposal:

i686-w64-mingw32-gcc    # 32-bit C compiler for Windows
x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc  # 64-bit C compiler for Windows
i686-w64-mingw32-g++    # 32-bit C++ compiler for Windows
x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++  # 64-bit C++ compiler for Windows

We'll compile the C code generated by the Vala compiler ourselves. To cross-compile the C source, we'll need the Windows specific headers for GLib, GIO, GObject, and the other libraries we'll use. Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have these headers and the binaries we'll need at the runtime in its repositories (Fedora does, by the way,) so we'll use the ones from the MSYS2 project.

First, create a directory where we'll place the Windows-specific libraries:

mkdir -p /your/path/to/libs
cd /your/path/to/libs

Download the libraries and their dependencies from the MSYS2 project (as your project grows, you'll need to download additional libraries as well):

wget https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-glib2-2.72.3-1-any.pkg.tar.zst \
     https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-pcre-8.45-1-any.pkg.tar.zst \
     https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-zlib-1.2.12-1-any.pkg.tar.zst \
     https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-libgee-0.20.5-2-any.pkg.tar.zst \
     https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-libffi-3.3-4-any.pkg.tar.zst \
     https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-gcc-libs-12.1.0-3-any.pkg.tar.zst \
     https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-libiconv-1.17-1-any.pkg.tar.zst \
     https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-gettext-0.21-3-any.pkg.tar.zst \
     https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-libwinpthread-git-10.0.0.r59.gaacb650be-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

Extract the packages:

for f in *.tar.zst; do tar --zstd -xf "$f"; done

For the pkg-config to function properly, we need to correct the prefix variable in the package configuration files. To do so, we'll simply filter the config files and change the prefix line via the stream editor:

find -name '*.pc' | while read file; do sed -E -i "s#^prefix=(\S*)#prefix=$PWD\1#" "$file"; done

Open the make file in the project root and update the LIBDIR line to your library path:

 ...
LIBDIR = "/your/path/to/libs"
 ...

and finally run make to build the sample:

make

before executing the sample, copy all the required runtime binaries to the executable's directory (don't forget to change the path):

while read file; do
    cp "/your/path/to/libs/mingw32/bin/$file" ./build/bin/
done << "EOL"
    libffi-7.dll
    libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll
    libgee-0.8-2.dll
    libgio-2.0-0.dll
    libglib-2.0-0.dll
    libgmodule-2.0-0.dll
    libgobject-2.0-0.dll
    libiconv-2.dll
    libintl-8.dll
    libpcre-1.dll
    libwinpthread-1.dll
    zlib1.dll
EOL

yetist/vala-win32

Vala Bindings for Native Windows Controls

Building