Same binary for GUI and command line use?

General JUCE discussion
1

Is there some clean way with JUCE to make the same executable work both as a GUI app and a command line program? Ideally I’d like to avoid doing any GUI initialization/teardown stuff as much as possible, to ensure running the program in the command line mode is as fast as possible.

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2

On Mac, a GUI application is an app bundle, but a console application is not. On Windows, you need to link with different flags.

So maybe it’s possible on Linux, but I don’t think it’s something JUCE could work around.

3

AFAIK, Projucer is a GUI application but you can run it also on the command line for some automated tasks, as shown here: Command line options

If that’s what you want, then you could have a look at its code and see how it’s done

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4

Yeah I just realized Projucer is supposed to work like that. @jules Unfortunately, at least on Windows running it from the command line makes it stuck and not return control to cmd.exe. The same thing happens in my app when I use the same code as Projucer does :

setApplicationReturnValue (appReturnCode);
quit();
return;
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5

IIRC under Windows you have to set a flag in VS to create a GUI application that also takes arguments from the CMD. But the drawback is that when you start such an application in GUI mode, it will always open a CMD window next to it - quite ugly.

An alternative is to compile like you do right now and launch your JUCE application via cygwin. There you can provide command line arguments.

6

Command line arguments already work for the GUI mode with the stock settings generated by Projucer for the Visual Studio project.

7

But is it also stuck when launched from cygwin? I never encountered an issue with the Projucer from within cygwin.

8

That would be quite moot as I don’t want to use or require users to use Cygwin.