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Installing a C compiler on Windows

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Delyan Angelov edited this page Oct 30, 2019 · 21 revisions

You can use either MinGW-w64 or Visual Studio. Visual Studio takes a lot more space, but its header files are more up-to-date, so Visual Studio is preferred if you plan to use the UI library.

MinGW-w64

Download and install MinGW-w64. I recommend installing it in C:\mingw-w64. You can use the default installation options.

Make sure the C:\mingw-w64\bin directory is in system's PATH, verify that by running gcc in your terminal.

Please note that Cygwin is not supported. It's used to run *nix software that doesn't run on Windows. V has full Windows support, so there's no point in Cygwin.

Visual Studio

Download and install Visual Studio 2019. The community edition will suffice. In the installer select Visual Studio core editor, Desktop development with C++, and Windows 10 SDK.

Now you can build V by launching cmd.exe and running

cd v
make

NB: on windows, the make.bat file first tries to locate gcc from MinGW-w64, and will use it, if it finds it. If not, it will try MSVC. If you want use MSVC, when you have both MinGW-w64 AND MSVC, you can pass: make -msvc

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