In the previous post in my series on Portable C++ on Windows, Compilers and Command Lines, we walked through the steps required to set yourself up with a windows-based C++ development environment which doesn’t rely on the Microsoft platform. We walked through getting set up with MinGW (GCC for Windows), MinGW-MSYS (BASH for Windows) and more recent versions of the GNU Autotools for your shiny BASH shell.
This time, we will walk through building the Boost libraries and the Xerces C++ XML library. Now, I know I mentioned in the first part that we would cover SFML as well, but this comes pre-built for windows, so we don’t need to worry about that (we will cover installing it and building a small example with it in the next part of this series).
Boost
First things first, you need to get hold of the Boost libraries, and also Boost Jam, which is the Boost build system. Use the links below. If you’re from the future you might want to go to boost.org and get the latest versions, but at the time of writing the links below were to the latest versions.
I unzipped the Boost JAM archive so that bjam.exe was in c:boostjam, and then used WEVE to edit my PATH environment variable so that the boostjam folder was on it. The next thing you’ll want to do is extract the Boost 1.37.0 archive so that you end up with a folder like c:librariesboost_1_37_0.
Next, fire up MSYS (make sure you are running as an administrator, especially if you are on Vista, with UAC turned on). Change directory to /c/libraries/boost_1_37_0 and then run ./configure. After this has completed you should have a file called user-config.jam. Mine looked like this:
# Boost.Build Configuration # Automatically generated by Boost configure # Compiler configuration using gcc ;
Now open up a windows command prompt (cmd.exe) and navigate to c:librariesboost_1_37_0 and invoke the following commands:
copy user-config.jam toolsbuildv2user-config.jam bjam debug -toolset=gcc stage
You’ll have to sit and wait for some time, but eventually you’ll have about 4GB of lib and dll files in the stagelib folder.
Xerces
We’re going to cover building the Xerces 3.0.0 XML library for C++. First, you’ll need to grab the source code and unzip it into the c:libraries folder as well. You should end up with a folder like c:librariesxerces-c-3.0.0. Fire up MSYS again if you closed it, and change directory to /c/libraries/xerces-c-3.0.0 and run:
./configure LDFLAGS=-no-undefined && make && make install
Again, you will have to sit for a while. When everything has completed you should be able to find the Xerces libraries in c:msys1.0locallib unless you installed MinGW-MSYS somewhere else.
That’s all for this part and I hope that everything went smoothly – if it didn’t, drop me a comment and I’ll try to help you out – next time we’ll be covering setting up the Eclipse CDT to use the tools we installed in Part 1, and also how to choose which libraries to link to.
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