Compiling wxWidgets with MinGW
This article applies to the following versions | ||
Platform | wxWidgets | MinGW |
---|---|---|
Windows XP | 2.8.11 | 5.1.4 |
Windows 7 | 2.9.1 | 5.1.4 |
Status: Up to Date |
Related Articles |
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Using Makefiles to compile wxWidgets |
Install MinGW
Please follow the steps described in Installing MinGW under Windows.
Download and Install wxWidgets
See Downloading and installing wxWidgets.
Build the library
Open the command prompt (Start > Run... > cmd). Change the directory to the build\msw folder. For example:
CD wx\\wx288\\build\\msw
Clean up the source:
mingw32-make -f makefile.gcc MONOLITHIC=1 SHARED=1 UNICODE=1 BUILD=release clean
Then, compile the library:
mingw32-make -f makefile.gcc MONOLITHIC=1 SHARED=1 UNICODE=1 BUILD=release
Note: For more information on the UNICODE and BUILD options, see WxWidgets Build Configurations. |
Build Output
In the example above a DLL was created under \lib\gcc_dll. The resultant setup.h file can be found under \lib\gcc_dll\mswu\wx
Executables created with can be rather BIG. In case you compile in DEBUG mode, the files become VERY BIG (>20 MB wxWidgets Minimal sample). With strip you can reduce the size, but it will always remain bigger than executables created with Visual Studio. In addition to that, Visual Studio seems to compile faster but I am not sure about this.
Troubleshooting
CreateProcess, The system cannot find the file specified.
if you get errors like this:
if not exist gcc_mswu mkdir gcc_mswu
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, -c "if not exist gcc_mswu mkdir gcc_mswu", ...) failed.
make (e=2): The system cannot find the file specified.
mingw32-make: [gcc_mswu] Error 2 (ignored)
if not exist ..\..\lib\gcc_lib mkdir ..\..\lib\gcc_lib
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, -c "if not exist ..\..\lib\gcc_lib mkdir ..\..\lib\gcc_lib", ...) failed.
make (e=2): The system cannot find the file specified.
mingw32-make: *** [..\..\lib\gcc_lib] Error 2
it's probably because you have MSYS installed and the MSYS\bin folder in your PATH, and this confuses mingw32-make. Remove the MSYS\bin folder from your PATH and try again, it should work. (Alternatively, use MSYS to build wxWidgets, as described in build\msw\install.txt in the wxWidgets source tree).
Note: MSYS\bin turns in to /bin, if you look from MinGW shell.
If you don`t have MSYS, edit your PATh=H environment variable and make sure your PATH points to the bin directory of your mingw installation.
Memory Exhausted (bin/ld.exe: out of memory allocating N bytes)
If you get "memory exhausted" errors, this is due to a Mingw bug. Use tdm-mingw instead : http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/ This applies to MinGW with installers 20110316 and 20110530 at least.
I'm not sure what