Hello all,
I have tried
OpenCPN for a while now and I'm quite happy to see that a lot of progress has been made in the last year.
I'm on a Mac and have C++ background (although 14 years of PHP don't help that much) so I thought I try to contribute and help make
OpenCPN better or iron out some bugs.
While I'm OK to compile OpenCPN on Mavericks (initial pitfalls were wxWidgets which needs be 3.0 and a few other glitches) I do have a problem with the plugins.
I'm using a mix of the
documentation from the OpenCPN "building on mac" page. I then use Xcode to compile.
While all compiles, I cannot run any plugins. I have to say also that I'm quite a bit of a Xcode
newbie, all my past (extensive) C++ development was done on MSVC (5+). My problem is that the
project statically links the wxWidget libraries to both the opencpn app as well as the plugins.
Each of them weigh in much more than the original (recent) release of OpenCPN.
Now, I wonder, if anyone who compiles on a Mac is even using the Xcode
project at all. I have so far not been able to build OpenCPN and the plugins without statically linked wxWidgets. I simply can't do it. I know I must be missing an interface file which lists the exported functions and dynamically loads the required dynlibs, however, on Windows I had no problem doing this, on Mac I fail. I remove the libs from xcode, the link will fail. I include the libs in the build phase, the plugins crash.
Result is that whenever a
plugin gets loaded, it crashes, and I presume (I do get a warning on this in the log on startup) that wxWidget symbols are found in both OpenCPN and the
plugin, and which one is being used is undefined.
Result: Crash (memory freed without being allocated)
I'm right now not at home (but cruising in the Philippines) and will be able to provide much more info later on, including a how-to I was then able to compile OpenCPN on Mac if somebody has problems in doing so.
I've compiled from the recent master, and have found that the performance (using CM93 maps) was much quicker and snappier than the compiled version downloaded from the opencpn page. For what's it worth; I didn't run benchmarks but it felt quite a bit faster (disabled opengl and running on my retina MBP later 2013).
I googled around for this and couldn't find a dedicated build page for mac so I'm
posting this here. If this not the correct place to ask, I would appreciate a pointer to the correct one.
Thanks and happy sailing,
Tom