ObjFW on Windows

This file contains instructions on how to get a working build environment to compile and use ObjFW on Windows.

Getting MSYS2

The first thing to install is MSYS2 to provide a basic UNIX-like environment for Windows. Unfortunately, the binaries are not signed and there is no way to verify their integrity, so only download this from a trusted connection. Everything else you will download using MSYS2 later will be cryptographically signed.

Updating MSYS2

The first thing to do is updating MSYS2. It is important to update things in a certain order, as pacman (the package manager MSYS2 uses, which comes from ArchLinux) does not know about a few things that are special on Windows.

First, update the mirror list:

$ pacman -Sy pacman-mirrors

Then proceed to update the msys2-runtime itself, bash and pacman:

$ pacman -S msys2-runtime bash pacman

Now close the current window and restart MSYS2, as the current window is now defunct. In a new MSYS2 window, update the rest of MSYS2:

$ pacman -Su

Now you have a fully updated MSYS2. Whenever you want to update MSYS2, proceed in this order. Notice that the first pacman invocation includes -y to actually fetch a new list of packages.

Installing MinGW-w64 using MSYS2

Now it's time to install MinGW-w64. If you want to build 32 bit binaries:

$ pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-clang mingw-w64-i686-gcc-objc

For 64 bit binaries:

$ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-objc

There is nothing wrong with installing them both, as MSYS2 has created two entries in your start menu: MinGW-w64 Win32 Shell and MinGW-w64 Win64 Shell. So if you want to build for 32 or 64 bit, you just start the correct shell.

Notice, though, that Clang is only installed for 32 bit binaries, as its SEH support is not sufficient for ObjFW yet. Therefore, if you follow these instructions, by default, 32 bit binaries will be built with Clang and 64 bit binaries with GCC.

Finally, install a few more things needed to build ObjFW:

$ pacman -S autoconf automake git make

Getting, building and installing ObjFW

Start the MinGW-w64 Win32 or Win64 Shell (depening on what version you want to build - do not use the MSYS2 Shell shortcut, but use the MinGW-w64 Win32 or Win64 Shell shortcut instead!) and check out ObjFW:

$ git clone https://heap.zone/git/objfw.git

You can also download a release tarball if you want. Now go to the newly checked out repository and build and install it:

$ autoreconf && ./configure && make -j16 install

If everything was successfully, you can now build projects using ObjFW for Windows using the normal objfw-compile and friends.