How to build static libraries from source?

Question

C++ / C#

Hello!
Please tell me how to compile lib files
The book told me that it is best to compile the sources on the machine where I am going to program, but I have never done this, much less compile someone else's code into an unknown file type

GLUT source structure

I see that, most likely, the structure of this archive is compiled according to some specification, following the standard, which means that there must be a universal way to collect such archives, please tell me how

Answer 1

For many programming languages, build systems come with compilers and are the de facto standard for the respective language.
There is no de facto build standard for C/C++, but there are several build systems that are commonly used:
make is a very simple utility, but inconvenient for large projects.
Can be identified by the presence of a Makefile. Sometimes this file is generated by the configure script.
If there is a Makefile, run:
Delete generated files (to start the build again):
cmake - a higher-level build system that generates projects for the IDE or the same Makefile.
Can be determined by the presence of CMakeLists.txt

mkdir cmake-build
# Создаём папку для сгенерированных файлов, чтобы не смешивались с исходниками
# Это называеться out-of-source build
cd cmake-build

# Генерируем проект или Makefile
cmake ..

# Запускаем билд, можно просто запустить make
cmake --build .

qmake is a build system designed for building Qt and projects using Qt.
Can be identified by the presence of .pro files. Build like this:

qmake
make

In your case make is used.