plain-toolchain-x86-64

With this project, it become trivial to get a native C/C++ compiler on Windows:

1. Download the latest release of plain-toolchain-x86-64 archive
2. Extract the archive in your workspace
3. Done: you have a decent C/C++ compiler on Windows!

This project is a very minimal addon to the amazing projects GNU GCC and winlibs. The whole point is to have a portable way to install GNU GCC without modification of any Windows environment variable (i.e. %PATH%). By doing that, the source code of the C/C++ project can be easily re-built verbatim on multiple computers.

Compile the example

Once the toolchain is downloaded and extracted, one can compile the hello-world project. The example should compile and run out-of-the-box and the process should be painless.

While the workspace directory name and location can be anywhere on the disk, the directory structure is very important and cannot be changed:

workspace
├───plain-toolchain-x86-64
├───hello-world
├───project-1
├───project-2
├───project-n

Using the GDB debugger

The GDB debugger is included in the winlibs package. To use it, simply start a shell with toolchain-shell-64.bat. This command will start a shell with the toolchain in the local %PATH%. From there, you can start GDB as usual. Obviously, in order to let GDB find the source code, the binary file need to contain the debugging information. Note that we are referring to the command-line version of GDB, not to any graphical user interface.

Register your own local environment variables

Advanced users may need to set environment variables locally. To do that, simply edit the file cmd-USER-ENVIRONMENT.bat. If one is using the fantastic Fossil SCM from Richard HIPP, he could specify the USER variable in this file.

set USER=Pascal

Integration with third-party tools

Notepad++

A lot of develppers use the free editor Notepad++, it's pretty easy to integrate with plain-toolchain-x86-64. It requires the plugin 'NppExec' to be installed.

Install the plugin NppExec from the menu 'Plugins Admin...'

Configure the Console filters

Add the custom highlight mask, so that if an error is displayed in the 'NppExec' console, it become highlighted and clickable.

%FILE%:%LINE%

Launch the compile script

One can double-click to jump to the error location.

Successful build

GNU Emacs

With the standard compile command

Type M-x compile and then write down the full command line.

M-x compile
C:\Users\Pascal\Desktop\workspace\hello-world\make-helloworld-gui.bat

When the user clicks on the error line, GNU Emacs will move to buffer to the error line. Press g in the `compilation buffer to recompile the project.

With the plain-emacs-commands package

One could setup plain-emacs-commands which make it very convenient to switch between compilation projects.

Licenses

GCC is released under the GNU General Public License.

Winlibs information can be found on their website.

The very few additional files are released under BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License:

- cmd-env-64.bat
- cmd-env-64-shell.bat
- cmd-env-common.bat
- cmd-USER-ENVIRONMENT.bat