How to simulate LGVL using SDL2 on VSCode (MacOS)

Introduction

I’ve started 2024 looking for new technologies to explore and there was one I had in mind to explore a bit, the LGVL library, a open-source graphics library for embedded systems.

When I started looking into the documentation about the simulator in VSCode, I noticed there was no clear documentation on how to run the simulator on macOS. After following the first steps and triying to build the code, I end up having no success on the last. The code didn’t build.

In order to find what was missing on my side, I decided to run a simple SDL minimal project and noticed the following line was NOT present in the previous repository Makefile:

`sdl2-config --cflags --libs`

This line will expose the C Flags and the library path, which are necesary for a successful build of the project.

-I/opt/homebrew/include/SDL2 -D_THREAD_SAFE
-L/opt/homebrew/lib -lSDL2

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Steps

a. Install SDL2:

foo@bar:~$ brew install sdl2

b. Find SDL2 paths:

foo@bar:~$ brew ls SDL2

It will print something like this:

/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sdl2/2.28.5/bin/sdl2-config
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sdl2/2.28.5/include/SDL2/ (78 files)
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sdl2/2.28.5/lib/libSDL2-2.0.0.dylib
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sdl2/2.28.5/lib/cmake/ (2 files)
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sdl2/2.28.5/lib/pkgconfig/sdl2.pc
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sdl2/2.28.5/lib/ (4 other files)
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sdl2/2.28.5/share/aclocal/sdl2.m4

c. Add the include SDL2 path to the Makefile:

INC := -I./ui/simulator/inc/ -I./ -I./lvgl/ -I/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sdl2/2.28.5/include/SDL2

d. Include the SDL2 library and respective C flags, by adding sdl2-config --cflags --libs:

$(BIN): $(OBJECTS)
  @mkdir -p $(BIN_DIR)
  $(CC) -o $(BIN) $(OBJECTS) $(LDFLAGS) ${LDLIBS} `sdl2-config --cflags --libs`

e. Change the main.c include #include <SDL2/SDL.h> to #include <SDL.h>.

f. Run make 🤝

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Other

I’ve created a PR to merge this info to the main branch.

There is also another PR which adds support for CMake on MacOS.