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LWXGL ships as a single shared object — libLWXGL.so — built directly from source with a one-line g++ invocation wrapped in a Makefile. There are no pre-built binaries; you compile it on your own machine and install it system-wide so that any project on the same machine can link against -lLWXGL. The build produces a position-independent shared library with hidden visibility by default, meaning only the functions explicitly tagged with __attribute__((visibility("default"))) are part of the public ABI.

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Prerequisites

Before building, make sure the following are available on your system:
  • GCC / G++ with C++11 support — the library source uses <chrono>, <thread>, <vector>, and other C++11 standard library features. Any GCC version shipped with a modern Linux distribution (GCC 5 or later) works.
  • libX11 development headers — required at compile time. On Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libx11-dev. On Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install libX11-devel.
  • The 9x15 bitmap font — loaded at runtime when a window is opened. On Debian/Ubuntu it is provided by the xfonts-base package: sudo apt install xfonts-base. Without this font GCreateWindow will return error code 2 and refuse to open a window.

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Build

Clone the repository and run make build: 
git clone https://github.com/dressedalarm184/lwxgl.git
cd lwxgl
make build
The make build target runs the following command: 
g++ -fPIC -shared -O2 -o libLWXGL.so src/main.cc -lX11 -fvisibility=hidden
FlagPurpose
-fPICGenerate position-independent code required for shared libraries.
-sharedProduce a shared object rather than an executable.
-O2Enable standard optimisations.
-lX11Link against the Xlib runtime.
-fvisibility=hiddenHide all symbols by default; only functions marked EXPORT (__attribute__((visibility("default")))) are visible to consumers.
After a successful build, libLWXGL.so appears in the repository root.

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Install

make install
The make install target performs the following three steps:
  1. Copies libLWXGL.so to /usr/local/lib.
  2. Copies src/libLWXGL.h to /usr/local/include.
  3. Runs ldconfig to refresh the dynamic linker cache so the new library is found by name (-lLWXGL) at link time and at runtime.
make install uses sudo for each step and writes files into system directories (/usr/local/lib and /usr/local/include). Make sure you trust the source before running it, and that you have sudo privileges on the target machine.

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Linking Your Project

Once the library is installed, compile any C program against it by passing -lLWXGL -lX11 to GCC: 
gcc -o my_app my_app.c -lLWXGL -lX11
For C++ projects, use G++ instead: 
g++ -o my_app my_app.cpp -lLWXGL -lX11
Both commands work because the public header libLWXGL.h wraps all declarations in an extern "C" block, making the library callable from either language without name-mangling issues.
LWXGL is compiled with -fvisibility=hidden, which means the shared object exports only the symbols explicitly annotated with __attribute__((visibility("default"))) in the source. This keeps the public ABI minimal and prevents accidental linkage against internal helpers. You can inspect the exported symbols at any time with nm -D libLWXGL.so | grep ' T '.

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