Re: Re: Does gcc support compiling for windows x86-64?

[Howard Chu <hyc at highlandsun dot com>]

Ali, Muhammad wrote:
> > > > but the preliminary gcc/gfortran for mingw 64-bit mode which FX Coudert
> > > > supplied was a version of gcc-4.3.

> > > May you can take a look at the developer project 'mingw-w64' on
> > > sourceforge for more details.

> Thanks for pointing me to the mingw-w64 sourceforge project. As Tim
> said, there isn't much documentation available for it, so I guess I'll
> just download and try it out. Although, at this point, I'm just
> thinking that downloading a trial version of Visual C++ and using it
> to compile my dll would be much easier :(. But even with that option,
> I'm not sure if its legal to distribute that dll with our package.

I started to download the trial Visual C++ but it says it's 32-bit only.

> > Ali didn't say if he meant g++ rather than gcc, but I guess all of this
> > has missed his intended topic.
> gcc. I'm working with a java application which is using JNI to call
> native libraries. We want to port our software to 64-bit platforms,
> and hence here I am, trying to figure out how to compile 64-bit dlls
> on my amd64.
>
> Thanks for all the comments,
> Ali.

I've downloaded a couple of the binary tarballs from the mingw-w64 project 
page. Had a lot of trouble getting usable code out of them. I finally figured 
out that I had to compile without any optimization to get anything to run. 
It's not clear whether this is a problem specific to the win64 support, or if 
it's gcc 4.3.0's immaturity. I was also frustrated by the lack of a working 
debugger, giving up half way through building gdb. I'm thinking it may be 
quicker to write a tool that converts the gcc stabs stuff to rudimentary PDB 
format to provide function and variable names for WinDbg.

The cross-compiler runs pretty well hosted on Linux but for some reason some 
of the configure scripts I ran were accessing my Linux header files and so 
detecting features they shouldn't have. My only other choice was to run under 
Cygwin on the Windows side, but shell scripts run about 100 times slower 
there, making configure/libtool/etc unbearable. (Normally I would use MSYS but 
the last one I tried just crashes immediately on Win64.) And it looks like 
current bash on cygwin doesn't handle case/esac constructs correctly, so e.g. 
the configure script for BerkeleyDB 4.6.21 fails there.

Gotta hand it to Microsoft, they've sure made it hard to support their platform...
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  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
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