a static library built using Cargo, which provides a C++ interface
a shared library built using CMake, which wraps that C++ interface to provide another that is more idiomatic.

Build

The prerequisites for building libloot and its C++ wrapper are CMake, the Rust toolchain and a C++ toolchain. The CI builds currently use a recent version of CMake, the latest version of Rust, MSVC 2022 on Windows and GCC 13 on Linux, so alternatives such as other versions, Mingw-w64 or Clang may not work without modifications.

To build a release build with debug info on Windows:

cmake -B build .
cmake --build build --parallel --config RelWithDebInfo

To do the same on Linux:

cmake -B build . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
cmake --build build --parallel

To cross-compile on Linux for Windows:

cmake -B build . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=cmake/toolchain-mingw64.cmake
cmake --build build --parallel

To build a debug build, pass Debug instead of RelWithDebInfo.

The following CMake variables can be used to configure the build:

Parameter	Values	Default	Description
`LIBLOOT_BUILD_SHARED`	`ON`, `OFF`	`ON`	Whether or not to build a shared libloot binary.
`LIBLOOT_BUILD_TESTS`	`ON`, `OFF`	`ON`	Whether or not to build libloot's tests.
`LIBLOOT_INSTALL_DOCS`	`ON`, `OFF`	`ON`	Whether or not to install libloot's docs (which need to be built separately).
`RUN_CLANG_TIDY`	`ON`, `OFF`	`OFF`	Whether or not to run clang-tidy during build. Has no effect when using CMake's Visual Studio generator.

An example of using libloot with CMake's FetchContent:

set(LIBLOOT_BUILD_TESTS OFF)
set(LIBLOOT_INSTALL_DOCS OFF)

FetchContent_Declare(libloot
    GIT_REPOSITORY "https://github.com/loot/libloot.git"
    GIT_TAG "master" # Better to use a specific commit hash.
    SOURCE_SUBDIR "cpp")

FetchContent_MakeAvailable(libloot)

add_executable(myapp ${MYAPP_SOURCES})
target_link_libraries(myapp PRIVATE libloot::loot)

Documentation

Install Doxygen, Python and uv and make sure they're accessible from your PATH, then run:

uv run --directory ../docs -- sphinx-build -b html . build/html

Tests

If the tests are built they can be run using:

ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure --parallel -V

Packaging

To package the build:

cpack --config build/CPackConfig.cmake -C RelWithDebInfo

Minimum supported Rust version

The minimum supported Rust version is 1.89. This may change at any time, but there is a CI job to check that it does not change unexpectedly.