In this post, I’m building wxWidgets on a Mac from source. This is done on a very old MacBook running El Capitan.

Building wxWidgets on a Mac is not very difficult. First, you download the source code and extract to a location where you want to use it from. I didn’t want to install it on a system directory, so I extracted it in my home folder (~/src/wxWidgets).

Documentation is provided in a txt file. I prefer to build a static library, so that the generated applications won’t need the wxWidgets library installed or distributed. That’s mentioned a bit late in the txt file. Create a folder like ~/src/wxWidgets/build-cocoa-static and from there configure the installation with ../configure --disable-shared (you can also pass --enable-debug to enable debugging). The --disable-shared will make the generated executables larger in size, but they will be independent.

After configure finishes, run make to build wxWidgets. This will take a while. You can also build demos and samples (e.g. cd samples; make).

Now you can also install wxWidgets so it’s available system wide. That’s done with sudo make install but I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I added ~/src/wxWidgets/build-cocoa-static to my PATH. This way, I don’t pollute my system with files I won’t know how to uninstall and I can maintain multiple versions of wxWidgets side by side.

The Makefiles that the samples are using are quite complex (to me at least). I think copying the minimal sample’s Makefile might be a good starting point. I have created an even smaller Makefile that uses the wx-config utility. wx-config generated command line arguments for compilation tasks. For example:

  • wx-config --cxx generates the compiler command that should be used (g++ in this case, with some Mac specific arguments)
  • wx-config --cxxflags generates the compiler arguments, such as the include directories where wxWidgets headers can be found and the appropriate preprocessor symbols
  • wx-config --libs generates the linker arguments, i.e. the libraries that the application should be linked against.

Using these, a Makefile can look like this:


CXX=`wx-config --cxx`

all: wxhelloworld

wxhelloworld: wxhelloworld.o
    $(CXX) -o wxhelloworld wxhelloworld.o `wx-config --libs`

wxhelloworld.o: wxhelloworld.cpp
    $(CXX) -c -o wxhelloworld.o wxhelloworld.cpp `wx-config --cxxflags`

clean:
    rm *.o
    rm wxhelloworld

Hope this helps.