ring/BUILDING.md

Differences from BoringSSL and OpenSSL

Here are the major differences between ring and BoringSSL & OpenSSL that affect building:

• BoringSSL uses CMake and OpenSSL uses make(1). ring uses Visual Studio's native build system (msbuild) on Windows, and GNU Make otherwise.
• BoringSSL and OpenSSL both support building static or shared libraries. ring is only supported in static library form.
• ring's static library is named ring.lib on Windows and libring.a on other platforms. BoringSSL and OpenSSL use different names.

Building on Linux and Similar Platforms

There is no ./configure step.

GNU Make 3.81 or later is required. Perl 5.6.1 or later is also required (unless you disable all the assembly language optimizations by building with NO_ASM=1). ring is designed with cross-compilation in mind so it expects variables CC, CXX, and TARGET to be passed to make. For example, this will build a 32-bit x86 ring for Linux using GCC 4.8:

make -j6 CC=gcc-4.8 CXX=g++-4.8 TARGET=i586-pc-linux-gnu

You must include all four parts in TARGET, except on Mac OS X you can omit the ABI. For example, this will build a 64-bit x86-64 ring for Mac OS X:

make -j6 CC=clang CXX=clang++ TARGET=x86_64-apple-darwin

All four parts of the target are required.

GCC 4.8 and later are supported, as are clang 3.4 and later. Other compilers will also probably work without too much trouble. Note in particular that if you are cross-compiling an x86 build on a 64-bit version of Linux, then you need to have the proper gcc-multilibs and g++-multilibs packages or equivalent installed.

The default build is a release build (CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELWITHDEBINFO). You can build a debug build by setting CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to DEBUG. (Note that the variable is named to be consistent with CMake, but CMake is not used.) For example, this will build ring in release mode with the default version of clang on Mac OS X:

make -j6 CC=clang-3.6 CXX=clang++-3.6 TARGET=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=DEBUG

Then compile your applications with -Iring/include (assuming you put ring into the ring subdirectory of your project) and add $(RING_LDFLAGS) to LDFLAGS in your linking step. RING_LDFLAGS expands by default to -pthread -Lbuild/$TARGET-$CC/lib -lring. (It should also be easy to build ring so that it doesn't depend on pthreads, but the build system hasn't been enhanced to fully support that yet.)

Running the tests using make check requires Go (https://golang.org/) to be in $PATH. Example:

make check -j6 CC=clang-3.6 CXX=clang++-3.6 TARGET=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

Building on Windows

Note that currently the assembly language optimizations are NOT built on Windows yet, only because the additions to the project files to support doing so haven't been made yet.

The Windows build requires Visual Studio 2013 or later. Any edition will work. Open ring.sln in Visual Studio and choose Build|Build Solution. Alternatively, from a Visual Studio Native Tools Command Prompt:

msbuild ring.sln

The built ring.lib will be put into a subdirectory of build/ depending on which configuration and which platform you choose to build for. For example, in a 32-bit release build, the result is build\Win32-Release\lib\ring.lib. In your application's project, add ring's include/ subdirectory to the "Additional Include Directories," add the directory containing ring.lib to the "Additional Library Directories", and add ring.lib to the "Additional Dependencies."

On Windows, ring can be build in Debug or Release configurations for platforms Win32 or x64. (It should be easy to add support for the ARM platform too.) The solution builds correctly using either Visual Studio 2013 or Visual Studio 2015 without any conversion steps being necessary. The project files are mostly hand-written and rely heavily on the property sheets in mk\*.props. All Visual Studio features should work. However, Visual Studio's project property editor often wrongly shows properties set in the property sheets as being unset. In general, it is much better to edit the *.props files by hand instead of using Visual Studio's GUI to edit the projects.

The tests currently require Go (https://golang.org/). For a 64-bit release build, run this from within the ring subdirectory:

go run util/all_tests.go --build-dir=build/x64-Release/test/ring