New OpenSlide binary build 4.0.0.2 released

Benjamin Gilbert bgilbert+openslide at cs.cmu.edu
Thu Mar 28 16:27:40 EDT 2024


I'm pleased to announce a new major release of the OpenSlide official
binary builds, now with Linux and macOS support.  openslide-bin
4.0.0.2 (formerly openslide-winbuild) provides pre-built OpenSlide
binaries for Linux x86_64, macOS arm64 + x86_64, and Windows x64.

These binaries are useful for quickly integrating OpenSlide into
non-Linux or cross-platform applications, without the need to compile
OpenSlide's entire dependency chain from scratch.  On all three
operating systems, openslide-bin ships a single shared library file,
with no external dependencies except for base libraries already
present on the system (glibc on Linux, SDK libraries on macOS, UCRT on
Windows).  The shared library only exports symbols from OpenSlide, not
from any of the bundled dependencies, which prevents conflicts with
other libraries (e.g. zlib or libjpeg-turbo) loaded into the same
process.

Starting with this release, OpenSlide library binaries are also
available from the openslide-bin project on PyPI.  The next OpenSlide
Python release will be able to use an OpenSlide binary installed with
`pip install openslide-bin`, removing the need to install OpenSlide
manually or via the system package manager.

With this release, openslide-bin removes support for 32-bit Windows.
That operating system is no longer available on new computers and is
limited to 3 GiB of address space, which is unsuitable for many
whole-slide imaging applications.

Finally, openslide-bin 4.0.0.2 updates OpenSlide Java to 0.12.4 and
updates many other dependencies.

## Getting the binaries

openslide-bin 4.0.0.2 is available for download from the OpenSlide
website under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License,
version 2.1:

    https://openslide.org/download/#binaries

## How to help

If you have a slide scanner that can produce files we don't have [1],
or ones OpenSlide can't read, please consider contributing a sample
[2].  If you grant us permission to redistribute your sample under the
Creative Commons Zero license, we can use it in automated tests and
share it with other developers working on open source WSI support!

[1]: https://github.com/openslide/openslide/wiki/DesiredTestData
[2]: https://openslide.org/submit/

## Full release notes

* Add Linux and macOS builds
* Add Python package with compiled library for OpenSlide Python ≥ 1.4.0
* Drop 32-bit Windows build
* Update OpenSlide Java to 0.12.4
* Update many dependencies
* Add CHANGELOG.md to source and binary archives
* Add versions.json to binary archives
* Rename project from openslide-winbuild to openslide-bin
* Change version number to OpenSlide version plus openslide-bin build number
* Restructure filenames of source and binary archives
* Switch source archive from Zip to tar.gz
* Rewrite build scripts


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