Build Instructions

Blend2D uses CMake to create native platform (or IDE) projects and to build them. Consult cmake-generators page to see which generators are supported on your target platform. You don't have to use CMake if you prefer other tools, but then you would have to set some compile flags and definitions manually, which is covered by Building Without CMake section. At the moment Blend2D only depends on AsmJit library, which is part of Blend2D source releases, but it's not part of Blend2D git repository. Git users have to clone AsmJit library separately.

Build Requirements

Operating systems supported:

CPU architectures supported:

C++ compilers recommended:

Build Configuration

By default only dynamically linked blend2d library is built. The following CMake build options are available:

Building From Source

The following steps can be used to clone and build Blend2D directly from git:

# Get both Blend2D and AsmJit.
$ git clone https://github.com/asmjit/asmjit
$ git clone https://github.com/blend2d/blend2d

# Create build directory.
$ mkdir blend2d/build
$ cd blend2d/build

# Configure the project. This would create either makefiles or
# IDE specific project files that are required to compile the
# project. Use BLEND2D_TEST to build tests.
#
# NOTE: Leave build type empty if you use Visual Studio or Xcode
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBLEND2D_TEST=TRUE

# Build the project. The build command depends on cmake-generator
# used to configure the project. If you use makefiles then `make`
# would be the command, otherwise it could be `ninja` or other IDE
# specific command.
$ cmake --build .

# Alternatively, if you use IDE such as Visual Studio or Xcode you
# may need to select the build type, which would default to Debug
# by default.
$ cmake --build . --config Release

# DONE: You should have either blend2d.dll or libblend2d.so library.

The following steps can be used to build Blend2D source release:

# Get source release directly from blend2d.com.
$ wget https://blend2d.com/download/blend2d-VERSION.zip
$ unzip blend2d-VERSION.zip

# Create build directory.
$ mkdir blend2d/build
$ cd blend2d/build

# Configure and build (see the previous section for more details).
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBLEND2D_TEST=TRUE
$ cmake --build .

# DONE: You should have either blend2d.dll or libblend2d.so library.

Building Sample Applications

The same approach can be used to build sample applications. The following example shows how to clone everything from Blend2D git repositories, but it would work with source as well:

# Get both Blend2D and AsmJit.
$ git clone https://github.com/asmjit/asmjit
$ git clone https://github.com/blend2d/blend2d

# Get Blend2D interactive demos and a benchmarking tool.
$ git clone https://github.com/blend2d/blend2d-apps

# Build blend2d-apps - will try to autodetect Cairo and Qt.
$ mkdir blend2d-apps/build
$ cd blend2d-apps/build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
$ cmake --build .
$ cd ..

# DONE: Your samples are compiled...

Building Without CMake

This page documents the process of building Blend2D without any help of CMake build scripts. It can be used as a reference of what CMake scripts are doing and as a recommendation of building Blend2D with other build tools or no build tools at all. Blend2D exports C API, but it's still a library written in C++ and requires at least C++11 capable compiler to build.

Compiler Independent Setup

Add the following source files to your target:

Setup the C++ compiler in the following way:

Define the following compile-time definitions to select a build type:

Define the following compile-time definitions to enable architecture-specific optimizations:

Please note that BL_BUILD_OPT_XXX compile-time definitions just tell Blend2D to build support for the optimizations, but to not rely on the presence of the extensions. Blend2D would use these optimizations if the CPU extension(s) required to use them were detected at run-time.

Compiler Specific Setup - GCC & Clang

Use the following [optional] compiler flags to make the resulting binaries better:

Additionally, each file with a certain suffix requires to be compiled with extra flags that enable architecture specific optimizations:

Compiler Specific Setup - MSVC

Use the following [optional] compiler flags to make the resulting binaries better:

Each file with a certain suffix requires to be compiled with extra flags that enable architecture specific optimizations:

If you use LLVM toolchain, which meas that a clang-cl compiler is used instead of the stock cl it's important to explicitly enable SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, and SSE4.2 optimizations together with -arch:SSE2, otherwise the compilation would fail as Clang is not 100% compatible with MS stock compiler in this area:

Linker Options

The following libraries are required on Windows:

The following libraries are required on Linux, BSDs, and others: