Skip to content

Installing GCC & MSYS2

Jump to bottom
Orson Peters edited this page Feb 9, 2017 · 3 revisions

GCC is a very good compiler collection, and is fully free (in speech and beer). There are however a ton of Windows distributions spread over the internet, but only some are of high quality. There's a lot of choices to be made as well, so I've made all those for you so you don't have to worry, and get good defaults.

We will use the MinGW-w64 port packaged with MSYS2. This also allows us to use *nix toolchains to build other libraries, as well as use the precompiled libraries that MSYS2 provides. Note that MSYS2 provides MinGW-w64 compilers. Binaries with these compilers will be standalone, and do not require a cygwin.dll or similar file.

I assume your development machine is 64-bit, and you want your compiler to target 64-bit windows by default. We will install both a 32-bit and a 64-bit target compiler toolchain, regardless.

If you have a 32-bit development machine, change every occurrence of C:\dev\msys64 with C:\dev\msys32 below. However, it's <current year>, get a 64-bit machine.

  1. Download msys2-x86_64-latest.exe and run it. If your development machine is 32-bit, download msys2-i686-latest.exe instead. Make sure to set the install directory to C:\dev\msys64 (C:\dev\msys32 for 32-bit). Choose to run MSYS2 right now.

  2. In the MSYS2 shell, execute the following. Hint: if you right click the title bar, go to Options -> Keys and tick "Ctrl+Shift+letter shortcuts" you can use Ctrl+Shift+V to paste in the MSYS shell.

    pacman -Syuu

  3. Close the MSYS2 shell once you're asked to. There are now 3 MSYS subsystems installed: MSYS2, MinGW32 and MinGW64. They can respectively be launched from C:\dev\msys64\msys2.exe, C:\dev\msys64\mingw32.exe and C:\dev\msys64\mingw64.exe. If the installer created any shortcuts to open shells for these subsystems, you can update them to these locations to get pretty icons. Each subsystem provides an environment to build Windows applications. The MSYS2 environment is for building POSIX compliant software on Windows using an emulation layer. The MinGW32/64 subsystems are for building native Windows applications using a linux toolchain (gcc, bash, etc), targetting respectively 32 and 64 bit Windows. We will install our PATH such that these tools can be called from regular cmd.exe as well, and we need only use the MinGW subsystem to install/update MSYS2 packages or if our build setup requires a *nix shell. Hint: after starting up MSYS2, the prompt will say which version you launched.

  4. Reopen MSYS2 (doesn't matter which version, since we're merely installing packages). Repeatedly run the following command until it says there are no further updates. You might have to restart your shell again.

    pacman -Syuu

  5. Now that MSYS2 is fully up-to-date we will install GCC and common build tools. When you are queried to select packages and confirm the installation just press enter:

    pacman -S --needed base-devel mingw-w64-i686-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \
                    git subversion mercurial \
                    mingw-w64-i686-cmake mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake

  6. Add C:\dev\msys64\mingw64\bin and C:\dev\msys64\mingw32\bin, in that order, to your PATH. Note that MSYS2 also puts a lot of other tools in this directory, most notably Python. So put these entries below any other tools you might have installed in your PATH.

Done. Now you can use gcc, g++, etc to get your 64-bit targeting compiler from your regular command line. To make 32-bit binaries, use i686-w64-mingw32-g++ and co.

To be safe and reproducible, MSYS2 by default disables inheriting your PATH settings in their environments. You can toggle this option per environment by looking in the respective .ini file in C:\dev\msys64 for MSYS2_PATH_TYPE=inherit. My recommendation is to inherit the path for the MinGW32/64 environments, but keeping the MSYS environment pure.

The instructions below are an example of installing a library, this part is not required.

First and foremost I suggest checking the package manager of MSYS2. It has a lot of pre-built library packages. You can search the package repository using pacman -Ss your_library, for example:

$ pacman -Ss boost
mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-boost 1.60.0-2
    Free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries (mingw-w64)
mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-boost 1.60.0-2
    Free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries (mingw-w64)

If the package name starts with mingw, it's a library. Install it using pacman -Sy package_name, e.g.:

$ pacman -Sy mingw-w64-i686-boost mingw-w64-x86_64-boost
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 mingw32 is up to date
 mingw64 is up to date
 msys is up to date
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (2) mingw-w64-i686-boost-1.60.0-2  mingw-w64-x86_64-boost-1.60.0-2

Total Installed Size:  546.33 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
(2/2) checking keys in keyring
(2/2) checking package integrity
(2/2) loading package files
(2/2) checking for file conflicts
(2/2) checking available disk space
(1/2) installing mingw-w64-i686-boost
(2/2) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-boost

Sadly there is no wildcard, but you can use pacman -Sy `pacman -Ssq boost` to install everything returned by a search.

If your library is not in the package manager you must compile it yourself. As an example, we'll try and build the 64-bit zlib library (this is an excercise - zlib is installed already by default):

  1. Open mingw64.exe (and if not already, cd to ~).

  2. Download and unpack zlib:

    wget http://zlib.net/zlib-1.2.8.tar.gz
tar xf zlib-1.2.8.tar.gz
cd zlib-1.2.8

  3. Configure, compile and install:

    make -f win32/Makefile.gcc install BINARY_PATH=/mingw64/bin \
INCLUDE_PATH=/mingw64/include LIBRARY_PATH=/mingw64/lib
cd ..
Clone this wiki locally