I've installed MinGW on my Linux machine and installed the MinGW package, however, I noticed that I can't run my program on Windows machines that don't have MinGW, I looked it up and soon found that the solution to this is to link statically. This worked, but it's still annoying to have to statically link everything and doesn't make much sense. I noticed that on my Windows machine where MinGW was installed I could compile a program without statically linking anything and the program would run successfully on any Windows machine regardless of whether it had MinGW installed or not.
My Linux box is running Arch Linux and Installed the mingw-w64-gcc AUR packages if that info helps at all.
Linux and Windows shared libraries / dynamically linked libraries are similar in how they get discovered. Your mingw program works in windows that has mingw installed because the installation likely added DLLs to your search path. Check out this article on DLL search order.
When you statically link, all that library code gets included in your executable.
If you want to share your mingw program with friends, then you need to also install all the shared libraries it uses in their search path. You can use sysinternals listdlls (or other tools) to find your dependencies, and include them in the same directory as your exe or install them to a library path (see the search order article).
You can also check out this article; How do I find out which dlls an executable will load? as it has lots of other options.
Related
I have a Windows 7 64bit system with the latest MinGW (32bit) installed along with the Qt 5.5 SDK (again 32bit) which also ships with its own MinGW. Due to the fact that I'm not the only one using the system I can't remove the standalone MinGW.
My project is using qmake and is a plain C project (not C++). Everything builds fine but when I try to execute my binary in the command line I get that the application was unable to start due to a missing libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll on the system.
After looking into the issue I found that both the standalone MinGW and the one shipped alongside the Qt SDK have the mentioned DLL.
Standalone MinGW - libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll is located inside the bin subdirectory of the MinGW installation where the binaries are located (gcc, g++, gdb etc.)
Qt MinGW - libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll is located inside C:\Qt\Tools\mingw492_32\i686-w64-mingw32\lib subdirectory while the MinGW components' binaries are inside C:\Qt\Tools\mingw492_32\i686-w64-mingw32\bin.
I would like to know how to properly set my PATH variable so that:
The application starts properly
No conflicts with the standalone MinGW installation occur
Just a side-note: I've already checked other posts here on SO but was unable to find a solution (perhaps I've missed it). I have also tried LIBS += -static but the result is the same.
You just need to copy this dll with your executable, i.e.:
cp <path-to-qt-install-dir>\qt5.7.0\5.7\mingw53_32\bin\libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll <path-to-dest-dir>
You mat find that you have other dependencies, to see which other deps you have you can use: ldd <your-executable>. You only need to copy the qt specific dlls you can see these by:
ldd <executable> | grep -i qt
note
You can statically link it with:
linker commands like -static-libgcc or -static, but I think you start to hit LGPL issues and also you may need to statically compile qt from source - can't recall for this particular file.
note2
Sorry ldd is for linux, just realized you have windows, in which case you can use one or both of:
dependency walker: from here
<path-to-qt-bin-folder>\windeployqt.exe <path-to-your-executable>
I have mixed results with windeployqt, but if you have any plugins its quiet good for getting that part sorted.
Please note: Although I'm specifically talking about the Eclipse CDT plugin, I'm almost 100% confident that any Windows/C/MinGW programmer can answer this question.
I'm on Windows 7 and am trying to write and compile a simple "Hello, C!" C application using Eclipse's CDT plugin. I'm reading their docs which state that having GCC installed is a prerequisite.
I just installed MinGW, making sure to include the following packages:
mingw-developer-toolkit
mingw32-base
mingw32-gcc-g++
msys-base
Back in the CDT docs (under the section titled Windows configuration), it states that I need to add g++, make and GDB to my PATH.
I'm wondering where MinGW installs these utilities, so that I can add them to my system PATH, and make the Eclipse CDT recognize their location at startup.
When using the Eclipse CDT plugin, you need GCC and its 3 specific utilities installed locally. These three utilities are: g++, make and gdb.
On Windows you can choose to install these utilities via Cygwin or MinGW. For a MinGW-based solution, go to their site and download the MinGW Package Manager. Then open the manager and install the following packages:
mingw-developer-toolkit
mingw32-base
mingw32-gcc-g++
msys-base
Then go to File >> Apply Updates and apply them. This will install the 3 utilities to the following directories on your machine:
C:\MinGW\bin\g++
C:\MinGW\bin\gdb
C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\make
Add these 3 binaries to your system PATH, restart Eclipse and you are all set.
I've made a small application in C with Netbeans.
I've ran the application in Netbeans and it created an exe.
I used that exe and it worked fine on my comp but when I move it to other comp it says:
"This application failed to start because cygwin1.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem."
How can i create the exe so that it runs anywhere?
The problem is you're using Cygwin GCC to compile your code. Cygwin provides a unix-like environment
if you're not doing anything Unix-y you can recomplie -mno-cygwin - see Can you statically compile a cygwin application?
if you are using Unix calls you'll need to distribute cygwin1.dll along with your app
or you can recompile with a different compiler, e.g. a GCC that targets mingw32 not cygwin, or one of the free (as-in-beer) Microsoft compilers from the platform SDK or Visual Studio Express downloads.
I want to build a static library (*.LIB file) GNU libiconv on windows to be used with other libraries in Visual C++. Other libraries I'm using are built with "MultiThreaded DLL" (/MD) Runtime option. So, I need to build libiconv with the same option.
Problem is the libiconv uses GNU build system and I want to compile with /MD option. You can see the source structure of libiconv here:
http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/libiconv/?root=libiconv
Mr. Zlatkovic maintains the windows port of GNU libiconv for libxml2
you can see them here:
ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/win32/iconv-1.9.2.win32.zip
I cannot use his port. I need to build from the latest version of libiconv-1.13. I wonder how this guy has ported it? Can some one please tell me how to build *.lib from this and compile it using MSVC?
EDIT:
Actually, I need to build few more gnu libraries with same settings. So, if I get solution for one library. I can do the same for all others.
I found PARK Youngho's How to Build libiconv with Microsoft Visual Studio over at The Code Project to be complete and clean (for VS2010 and GNU libiconv 1.14).
A little addition to your answer.
I had the same issue and found that the MinGW + MSYS solution was perfect.
Though, I needed to go a little further and generate also the .lib file in order to be able to link with the resulting dll.
This is what I found:
generate a .def file from the dll with dumpbin (a Visual Studio tool).
generate the .lib file from the .def with the lib program (Visual Studio tool too)
This allows you to specify some link flags if appropriate.
Everything detailed here (I'm not the author of this method):
http://wiki.videolan.org/GenerateLibFromDll
I also realized that this lib/dll couple can be linked with both MD and MDd libraries.
Hope that can help people that find this post, like it helped me.
-David
I'm the OP. MSYS is the exact thing what I was looking for.
Just install MinGW & MSYS which contains shell sh.exe & make.exewith which you can configure and generate a Makefile after that you can use make.exe to run it.
Its as simple as that.
compile them using MinGW using Msys for the environment if needed. MinGW's .a files are apparently, according to the mailing list, the same format as .lib files (just do a rename). You might want to check first to see if the iconv static library is included already in the MinGW download / filesystem.
Edit: it's in msys (C:\msys\1.0\lib), along with:
libiconv.a
libiconv.dll.a
libiconv.la
and additionally
libiconv-2.dll (in C:\msys\1.0\local\bin)
Edit: is it in here, the libiconv you need? these versions seem to have MSVC makefiles :) http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/libiconv/
I haven't done C in a long time. I'd like to compile this program, but I have no idea how to proceed. It seems like the makefile refers to GCC a lot and I've never used GCC.
I just want an executable that will run on windows.
You may need to install either cygwin or mingw, which are UNIX-like environments for Windows.
http://www.mingw.org/
http://www.cygwin.com/
When downloading/installing either cygwin or mingw, you will have the option of downloading and installing some optional features; you will need the following:
gcc (try version 2.x first, not 3.x)
binutils
GNU make (or gmake)
If it requires gcc and you want it to run on Windows, you could download Cygwin.
That's basically an emulator for GNU/Linux type stuff for Windows. It works with an emulation DLL.
http://www.cygwin.com/
In order to compile this program you need a C compiler. It does not have to be gcc, although you are already given a makefile set up to use gcc. The simplest thing for you to do would be the following:
Install cygwin
Open the cygwin command prompt
go into the directory where you have your makefile
type 'make'
That should compile your program
If you are not comfortable with using command line tools then you can download the free version of MS Visual Studio and import the source files into a new Visual Studio project. This way you would not need to install cygwin and use gcc, but you would need to know how to create projects and run programs in Visual Studio.
You almost certainly don't need all of cygwin to compile using gcc. There are plenty of standalone gcc clones for Windows, like gcw.
If it's reasonably portable C code (I haven't looked at it), then you may be able to just ignore the included Makefile and feed the source into whatever compiler you do want to use. What happens when you try that?
Dev-C++ provides a simple but nice IDE which uses the Mingw gcc compiler and provides Makefile support. Here are the steps I used to build the above code using Dev-C++ (i.e. this is a "how-to")
After downloading the source zip from NIST, I
downloaded and installed the Dev-C++ 5 beta 9 release
created a new empty project
added all the .c files from sts-2.0\src
Then under Project Options
added -lm in the Linker column under Parameters
added sts-2.0\include to the Include Directories in Directories
set the Executable and Object directories to the obj directory under the Build Options
and then hit OK to close the dialog. Go to Execute > Compile and let it whirl. A minute later, you can find the executable in the sts-2.0\obj directory.
First, there is little chance that a program with only makefiles will build with visual studio, if only because visual studio is not a good C compiler from a standard POV (the math functions in particular are very poorly supported on MS compilers). It may be possible, but it won't be easy, specially if you are not familiar with C. You should really stick to the makefiles instead of trying to import the code in your own IDE - this kind of scienfitic code is clearly meant to be compiled from the command line. It is a test suite, so trying things randomly is NOT a good idea.
You should use mingw + msys to install it: mingw will give you the compilers (gcc, etc...) and msys the shell for the make file to run correctly. Contrary to one other poster, I would advise you against using gcc 2 - I don't see any point in that. I routinely use gcc 3 (and even 4) on windows to build scientific code, it works well when the code is unix-like (which is the standard platform for this kind of code).