So, you've decided you need a binary component in you add-on? Great! read this. Okay, that's a little long and complicated (sorry, Matt). How about this? Ah, that does look simpler, but it doesn't work on a recent Mozilla build, you say? Fear not, I have for you:
The Binary XPCOM Component Starter Kit
The actual component is the same from Alex Sirota, so do read his page, it has a ton of useful information. My version has an updated makefile (not yet tested on windows, I plan to do that soon), and is designed to be unpacked directly into your extension. It will create a "src" directory with sample sources.
What you need:
- An already set-up extension, already set up to be loaded on some profile you test.
- The gecko SDK. If you have a mozilla build tree, that's in objdir/dist/sdk
- A mozilla-build.h file, see this bug for details. Copy it into sdk/include for now.
- A mozilla build environment (compiler, etc).
Once you unpack the tarball into your extension, go into the src directory and run 'make sdkdir=/path/to/sdk'. If all goes well, it should build the component and place it into a platform-specific directory in your extension (did you know you can include multiple builds of a binary component, for each platform, in the same extension?).
It's pretty rough, I just spent some time on the makefile yesterday and haven't tried to make it work on Windows yet. But it's a start!