How To Install Packages In Cygwin

How to Install the Latest GCC on Windows. Several modern C features are currently missing from Visual Studio Express, and from the system GCC compiler provided with many of todays Linux distributions. Generic lambdas also known as polymorphic lambdas are one such feature. This feature is, however, available in the latest versions of GCC and Clang. The following guide will help you install the latest GCC on Windows, so you can experiment with generic lambdas and other cutting edge C features. Youll need to compile GCC from sources, but thats not a problem. Depending on the speed of your machine, you can have the latest GCC up and running in as little as 1. The steps are Install Cygwin, which gives us a Unix like environment running on Windows. Install a set of Cygwin packages required for building GCC. From within Cygwin, download the GCC source code, build and install it. Test the new GCC compiler in C1. Update As a commenter points out, you can also install native GCC compilers from the Min. GW w. 64 project without needing Cygwin. Install Cygwin. First, download and run either the 3. Cygwin installer, depending on your version of Windows. How To Install Packages In Cygwin' title='How To Install Packages In Cygwin' />Cygwins setup wizard will walk you through a series of steps. If your machine is located behind a proxy server, make sure to check Use Internet Explorer Proxy Settings when you get to the Select Your Internet Connection step. When you reach the Select Packages step shown below, dont bother selecting any packages yet. Just go ahead and click Next. Well add additional packages from the command line later. After the Cygwin installer completes, its very important to keep the installer around. The installer is an executable named either setup x. How To Install Packages In Cygwin' title='How To Install Packages In Cygwin' />Cygwin packages in the future. I suggest moving the installer to the same folder where you installed Cygwin itself typically C cygwin or C cygwin. If you already have Cygwin installed, its a good idea to re run the installer to make sure it has the latest available packages. How To Install Packages In Cygwin' title='How To Install Packages In Cygwin' />Alternatively, you can install a new instance of Cygwin in a different folder. Install Required Cygwin Packages. II/ptII10.0/img/CygwinSetupSelectLocalPackageDirectory.png' alt='How To Install Packages In Cygwin' title='How To Install Packages In Cygwin' />Installing and Updating Cygwin Packages Installing and Updating Cygwin for 64bit versions of Windows. Run setupx8664. exe any time you want to update or install a. Installation From Source Edit. Icarus is developed for Unixlike environments but can also be compiled on Windows systems using the Cygwin environment or MinGW compilers. Next, youll need to add several packages to Cygwin. You can add them all in one fell swoop. Just open a Command Prompt in Windows, navigate to the folder where the Cygwin installer is located, and run the following command C cygwin. P wget P gcc g P make P diffutils P libmpfr devel P libgmp devel P libmpc devel. A window will pop up and download all the required packages along with their dependencies. At this point, you now have a working GCC compiler on your system. Its not the latest version of GCC its whatever version the Cygwin maintainers chose as their system compiler. At the time of writing, thats GCC 4. To get a more recent version of GCC, youll have to compile it yourself, using the GCC compiler you already have. Download, Build and Install the Latest GCCOpen a Cygwin terminal, either from the Start menu or by running Cygwin. Cygwin installation folder. If your machine is located behind a proxy server, you must run the following command from the Cygwin terminal before proceeding otherwise, wget wont work. This step is not needed if your machine is directly connected to the Internet. Direct Folders 3.5 Serial there. HTTPPROXY httpsproxyHTTPPROXY ftpproxyHTTPPROXY. To download and extract the latest GCC source code, enter the following commands in the Cygwin terminal. If youre following this guide at a later date, there will surely be a more recent version of GCC available. I used 4. 9. 2, but you can use any version you like. Keep in mind, though, that its always best to have the latest Cygwin packages installed when building the latest GCC. Be patient with the tar command it takes several minutes. That will create a subdirectory named gcc 4. Next, well configure our GCC build. As the GCC documentation recommends, its best to configure and build GCC in another directory outsidegcc 4. Heres a description of the command line options passed to configure The program suffix 4. GCC is installed, well run it as g 4. This will make it easier for the new GCC compiler to coexist alongside the system GCC compiler provided by Cygwin. The enable languagesc,c option means that only the C and C compilers will be built. Compilers for other languages, such as Fortran, Java and Go, will be excluded. This will save compile time. The disable bootstrap option means that we only want to build the new compiler once. If we dont specify disable bootstrap, the new compiler will be built three times, for testing and performance reasons. However, the system GCC compiler 4. Cygwin is pretty recent, so disable bootstrap is good enough for our purposes. This will save a significant amount of compile time. The disable shared option means that we dont want to build the new standard C runtime library as a DLL thats shared with other C applications on the system. Its totally possible to make C executables work with such DLLs, but it takes care not to introduce conflicts with C executables created by older or newer versions of GCC. Thats something distribution maintainers need to worry about not us. Lets just avoid the additional headache. By default, the new version of GCC will be installed to usrlocal in Cygwins virtual filesystem. This will make it easier to launch the new GCC, since usrlocalbin is already listed in Cygwins PATH environment variable. However, if youre using an existing Cygwin installation, it might prove difficult to uninstall GCC from usrlocal later on if you so choose, since that directory tends to contain files from several different packages. If you prefer to install the new GCC to a different directory, add the option prefixpathtodirectory to the above configure command. Were not going to build a new Binutils, which GCC relies on, because the existing Binutils provided by Cygwin is already quite recent. Were also skipping a couple of packages, namely ISL and CLoo. G, which means that the new compiler wont be able to use any of the Graphite loop optimizations. Next, well actually build the new GCC compiler suite, including C, C and the standard C library. This is the longest step. The j. 4 option lets the build process spawn up to four child processes in parallel. If your machines CPU has at least four hardware threads, this option makes the build process run significantly faster. The main downside is that it jumbles the output messages generated during the build process. If your CPU has even more hardware threads, you can specify a higher number with j. For comparison, I tried various numbers on a Xeon based machine having 1. Be warned I encountered a segmentation fault the first time I ran with j. Bad luck on my part. If that happens to you, running the same command a second time should allow the build process to finish successfully. Also, when specifying higher numbers with j, there are often strange error messages at the end of the build process involving jobserver tokens, but theyre harmless. Once thats finished, install the new compiler make install. This installs several executables to usrlocalbin it installs the standard C librarys include files to usrlocalincludec4. C library to usrlocallib, among other things.