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org.eclipse.equinox.executable.feature

README.md

This feature contains the executables and launcher bundle along with its fragments used to launch Equinox respectively Eclipse based stand-alone applications. It also hosts the native C source files and scripts to build these executable and launcher library binaries for all supported platforms.

The Equinox launcher executable is the executable binary file that can be used to launch an Equinox based applications like Eclipse. It is for example named eclipse.exe (on Windows) or eclipse (on Linux and Mac). The launcher library is the native dynamic/shared library (eclipse.dll, eclipse.so, ...) that contains the compiled native code called from the org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.JNIBridge.

Building the native executable and launcher binaries

Required software

The software listed below is required to build the Equinox native binaries on the current platform targeting the same OS and processor arch.

  • common
    • a JDK 1.8 or later. More recent versions can be used too. Equinox itself uses a.t.m a JDK 17 to built the official binaries.
  • Windows:
    • Microsoft Visual C Compiler 2022 or later (earlier version usually work as well), the Visual Studio Community Edition is sufficient.
  • Linux:
    • GTK development files. The Package libgtk-3-dev is sufficient.
  • MacOS:
    • XCode Command Line Tools (already installed with Apple XCode)

Running the build

The simplest way to build and install the native binaries for the running platform is to launch the Maven launch-configuration named Build-Equinox-native-binaries-for-running-platform from this project (requires Eclipse M2E). It assumes the equinox.binaries repository is checked out located next to this repository and is named equinox.binaries.

To just build the native binaries for a specific platform navigate to the library/<window-system> sub-directory of interest and run

  • ./build.sh for Linux or MacOS
  • .\build.bat for Windows

For the complete development setup, which is required to run the Maven build or the equinox.launcher.tests

  1. Clone the equinox.binaries repository co-located to this repository.
  2. Run from the library/<window-system> sub-directory matching the platform of interest
    • ./build.sh install for Linux or MacOS
    • .\build.bat install for Windows

The install target additionally moves the just built binaries into the equinox.binaries repository clone.

The environment variable BINARIES_DIR can be set to specify an alternative path to the equinox.binaries repository to which the built binaries are moved. To independently specify the exact directory where the native executable or launcher library is moved, set the variable EXE_OUTPUT_DIR respectively LIB_OUTPUT_DIR. For more options and details see the build.sh/bat files and corresponding make-files.

Cross compilation

On some platforms cross-compilation for other CPU architectures is possible by invoking the build.sh/bat scripts with an explicit -arch <target-arch> argument. Of course the required tools for the targeted architecture have to be available. For example on a Windows computer with x86_64 CPU, to build the binaries for Windows on ARM one can call build.bat -arch aarch64 -java <path-to-arm-jdk>.