Missing DLLs for Windows runtime

[Ortega-Dan]

When running on Windows it is asking for magickWand DLL and many more DLLs. Do we know if there is an easy way to get them all ?

Or is there a way to have a static build not dependent of other DLLs ?

[jamesmacwhite]

An easier way is to install the zbar package through MSYS2

https://packages.msys2.org/package/mingw-w64-x86_64-zbar

I have found the binaries and building from source to be broken foe Windows. The building on Windows steps requires MSYS2 anyway, you can install it and then run pacman to install zbar and the exe should work fine. You will need to run zbarcam.exe from a MINGW shell, for the binary to be in the PATH. Otherwise you can manually run it from C:\msys64\mingw64\bin or 32 if not on a 64-bit machine.

[Ortega-Dan]

An easier way is to install the zbar package through MSYS2

https://packages.msys2.org/package/mingw-w64-x86_64-zbar

I have found the binaries and building from source to be broken foe Windows. The building on Windows steps requires MSYS2 anyway, you can install it and then run pacman to install zbar and the exe should work fine. You will need to run zbarcam.exe from a MINGW shell, for the binary to be in the PATH. Otherwise you can manually run it from C:\msys64\mingw64\bin or 32 if not on a 64-bit machine.

Or just add C:\[...]\mingw64\bin to Path environment variable. (But I anyway know it is better just to run it from the location, because C:\[...]\mingw64\bin may have much more executables and DLLs that are not really needed to be exposed in the entire Windows environment from Path env)

[Ortega-Dan]

@jamesmacwhite Thank you very much for the pointer.

I've tried several times to build it, and it seems like it built successfully but then had troubles finding delegates for image formats processing and some other stuff. This is the very first time that I've got this updated version to work successfully on Windows.

Great help :+1:

[jamesmacwhite]

@Ortega-Dan no worries. I found similar issues. The prebuilt package is much easier with MSYS2 and pacman I did get a build of zbarcam compiled but still got dll errors and took the easy way out in the end. I get the impression some of building from source info is outdated looking at other GitHub issues.

Adding ming64\bin to PATH is something you can do as you say.

Obviously the downside is using the prebuilt means the version might be slightly outdated. I think though that zbarcam binary issue on Windows that @itsmattkc found is fixed in the pacman package.

[rollingmoai]

For QR Codes, I have found https://github.com/sayanarijit/qrscan to work well for me.

[Elemecca]

Yeah, the existing build needs a lot of finagling to make it build actually static executables that only depend on DLLs that ship with Windows rather than needing an MSYS2 installation with a bunch of packages.

Here are the instructions I wrote for my own project on how to build an actual statically-linked copy of zbarimg. The resulting executable is about 6 MB.

Windows Build

We build our own zbarimg.exe because the official ones aren't statically linked and depend on a lot of DLLs that they don't ship with.

The build is done on Windows in an MSYS2 UCRT64 environment.

Install Dependencies

pacman -S \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-autotools \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libpng \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libwebp \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-zlib \
    upx

GraphicsMagick

The ImageMagick package in MSYS2 has broken static archives, and the GraphicsMagick package doesn't have static archives at all, so we have to build our own. We use GraphicsMagick because it's a little easier to build and results in a smaller final executable.

Download and extract the source tarball from GraphicsMagick, then cd into its root directory.

./configure \
    --prefix=$(pwd)/../install \
    PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$(pwd)/../install/lib/pkgconfig \
    --disable-shared \
    --enable-static \
    --disable-dependency-tracking \
    --disable-installed \
    --disable-openmp \
    --without-magick-plus-plus \
    --without-threads \
    --without-bzlib \
    --without-dps \
    --without-gdi32 \
    --without-jbig \
    --without-heif \
    --without-jp2 \
    --without-jxl \
    --without-lcms2 \
    --without-lzma \
    --without-tiff \
    --without-trio \
    --without-ttf \
    --without-wmf \
    --without-xml \
    --without-zstd \
    --without-x
    
make
make install

It might be nice to remove:

• --without-heif for iPhone photo (HEIF) support
• --without-xml for SVG support

They're currently disabled because their MSYS2 packages lack static archives.

ZBar

Download and extract the source tarball from ZBar, then cd into its root directory.

autoreconf -vfi

./configure \
    --prefix=$(pwd)/../install \
    PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$(pwd)/../install/lib/pkgconfig \
    --disable-dependency-tracking \
    --disable-shared \
    --enable-static \
    --disable-rpath \
    --disable-nls \
    --disable-pthread \
    --disable-doc \
    --disable-video \
    --with-graphicsmagick \
    --without-python \
    --without-java \
    --without-gtk \
    --without-qt
    
make LDFLAGS=-all-static
make install

We really need to pass -all-static to libtool in order to produce a static executable: with just -static it only statically links local libraries, but still dynamically links any DLLs that are already installed. However, passing LDFLAGS=-all-static to ./configure makes the gcc detection fail, so we pass it to make instead where it can't affect the compiler checks.

Make it Smaller

We can use UPX to shrink the executable significantly:

upx --best ../install/bin/zbarimg.exe

Copy the Files

Set TARGET to wherever you want your installation to live.

mkdir -p $TARGET/magick
cp ../install/bin/zbarimg.exe $TARGET/
cp -r ../install/{lib,share}/GraphicsMagick-*/config/* $TARGET/magick/

You will need to set the environment variable MAGICK_CONFIGURE_PATH to $TARGET/magick at runtime if you want to use GraphicsMagick delegate-based file formats like PDF.