Building LDC on MinGW x86

This page is a step-by-step guide to setting up a development environment for LDC based on MinGW.

Note: These instructions were last verified to work on date 04 February 2014, using LDC commit 704ab30001582dc67084e6ea8967e61e8112d595.

The resulting compiler will create 32 bit executables. Due to the different exception handling models, it is not currently possible to use LDC to target 64 bit Windows/MinGW. Running the 32 bit compiler on a 64 bit Windows system is entirely possible, however.

Note that the below instructions refer to precise package versions and file system paths. The intention behind this is to record a known-good configuration. Newer releases or differing paths will probably work as well if you know what you are doing.

1. Get a recent build of MinGW-w64 for i686 (i.e. 32 bit) targets, with DWARF2-style exception handling (-dw2). A fresh build is required because support for the SECREL32 relocation type needed to implement TLS was only recently added to GNU as, and TLS support in the MinGW runtime was broken:
   • Download and extract i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-dw2-4.8.0-win32_rubenvb.7z, renaming the top folder to C:\MinGW.
   • You can also use newer builds of MinGW-w64 for i686. E.g. i686-4.9.1-release-posix-dwarf-rt_v3-rev1 is known to work. Download the installer and choose a gcc version, architecture i686, posix threads and dwarf exceptions. If this fails then you can find the files here.
2. Install MSYS and the usual tools like Git:
   • Download msys+7za+wget+svn+git+mercurial+cvs-rev13.7z from the MinGW-Builds project, extract it to C:\MinGW, add C:\MinGW\ /mingw to C:\MinGW\msys\etc\fstab.
   • Ensure that C:\MinGW is in your PATH and make sure you're using the GCC version downloaded above by checking the output of gcc.exe --version.
   • For your own sanity, you might want to use something like Console2 to handle the MinGW shell (set the shell to C:\MinGW\msys\bin\bash.exe --login -i).
3. Install CMake 2.8.11 using the Windows installer from http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html, making sure it is on your MSYS $PATH (e.g. by letting the installer put it on your %PATH%).
   • Optional: Install Ninja (binaries) somewhere on your MSYS $PATH for shorter compile times, especially on incremental builds. If you don't want to use Ninja, simply change the CMake generator to Makefiles (-G"MSYS Makefiles") and use make (install) instead of the ninja commands.
4. LLVM:
   • Fetch the LLVM 3.4 source: Either use the release tarball or checkout the release_34 branch of the SVN/Git (http://llvm.org/git/llvm.git) repository.
   • Build and install it: cd /n/Build/Work/llvm-3.4-release && cmake /c/Build/Source/llvm/ -G Ninja -DLLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD=X86 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/n/Build/Intermediate/llvm-3.4-release -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && ninja && ninja install.
5. Fetch the libconfig++ tarball and install it (./configure; make; make install). Don't try an out-of-source build, directory seperator issues tend to break the Makefiles.
6. LDC:
   • Clone the repository: git clone --recursive https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc.git
   • Build it: cmake /c/Build/Source/ldc/ -G Ninja -DLLVM_ROOT_DIR='/n/Build/Intermediate/llvm-3.4-release' -DLIBCONFIG++_INCLUDE_DIR=/local/include -DLIBCONFIG++_LIBRARY=/local/lib/libconfig++.dll.a -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && ninja
7. Additional dependencies:
   • You will probably want to install libcurl in order to use std.net.curl (including as part of the test suite): Just fetch the latest source release, extract it, and run ./configure --prefix=/mingw && make && make install. Installing to /mingw is not strictly necessary, but will save you from manually specifying the path anywhere.