Several modern C features are currently missing from Visual Studio Express, and from the system GCC compiler provided with many of today’s Linux distributions. – also known as polymorphic lambdas – are one such feature. This feature is, however, available in the latest versions of GCC and Clang.The following guide will help you install the latest GCC on Windows, so you can experiment with generic lambdas. You’ll need to compile GCC from sources, but that’s not a problem. Depending on the speed of your machine, you can have the latest GCC up and running in as little as 15 minutes.The steps are:.
Install Cygwin, which gives us a Unix-like environment running on Windows. Install a set of Cygwin packages required for building GCC. From within Cygwin, download the GCC source code, build and install it. Test the new GCC compiler in C14 mode using the -std=c14 option.Update: As a commenter points out, you can also install native GCC compilers without needing Cygwin. 1. Install CygwinFirst, download and run either the 32- or 64-bit version of the, depending on your version of Windows.
Install Make In Cygwin
Cygwin’s setup wizard will walk you through a series of steps. If your machine is located behind a proxy server, make sure to check “Use Internet Explorer Proxy Settings” when you get to the “Select Your Internet Connection” step.When you reach the “Select Packages” step (shown below), don’t bother selecting any packages yet. Just go ahead and click Next. We’ll add additional packages from the command line later.After the Cygwin installer completes, it’s very important to keep the installer around.
The installer is an executable named either setup-x86.exe or setup-x8664.exe, and you’ll need it to add or remove Cygwin packages in the future. I suggest moving the installer to the same folder where you installed Cygwin itself; typically C:cygwin or C:cygwin64.If you already have Cygwin installed, it’s a good idea to re-run the installer to make sure it has the latest available packages. Alternatively, you can install a new instance of Cygwin in a different folder. Install Required Cygwin PackagesNext, you’ll need to add several packages to Cygwin. You can add them all in one fell swoop. Just open a Command Prompt (in Windows), navigate to the folder where the Cygwin installer is located, and run the following command: C:cygwin64setup-x8664.exe -q -P wget -P gcc-g -P make -P diffutils -P libmpfr-devel -P libgmp-devel -P libmpc-develA window will pop up and download all the required packages along with their dependencies.At this point, you now have a working GCC compiler on your system.
It’s not the latest version of GCC; it’s whatever version the Cygwin maintainers chose as their system compiler. At the time of writing, that’s GCC 4.8.3. To get a more recent version of GCC, you’ll have to compile it yourself, using the GCC compiler you already have.
Download, Build and Install the Latest GCCOpen a Cygwin terminal, either from the Start menu or by running Cygwin.bat from the Cygwin installation folder.If your machine is located behind a proxy server, you must run the following command from the Cygwin terminal before proceeding – otherwise, wget won’t work. This step is not needed if your machine is directly connected to the Internet. $ export httpproxy=$HTTPPROXY httpsproxy=$HTTPPROXY ftpproxy=$HTTPPROXYTo download and extract the latest GCC source code, enter the following commands in the Cygwin terminal. If you’re following this guide at a later date, there will surely be a of GCC available. I used 4.9.2, but you can use any version you like.
Keep in mind, though, that it’s always best to have the latest Cygwin packages installed when building the latest GCC. Be patient with the tar command; it takes several minutes.
$ wget tar xf gcc-4.9.2.tar.gzThat will create a subdirectory named gcc-4.9.2. Next, we’ll configure our GCC build. As the recommends, it’s best to configure and build GCC in another directory outside gcc-4.9.2, so that’s what we’ll do. $ mkdir build-gcc$ cd build-gcc$./gcc-4.9.2/configure -program-suffix=-4.9.2 -enable-languages=c,c -disable-bootstrap -disable-sharedHere’s a description of the command-line options passed to configure:.The -program-suffix=-4.9.2 option means that once our new GCC is installed, we’ll run it as g-4.9.2.
Kismet Wsl
This will make it easier for the new GCC compiler to coexist alongside the system GCC compiler provided by Cygwin.The -enable-languages=c,c option means that only the C and C compilers will be built. Compilers for other languages, such as Fortran, Java and Go, will be excluded. This will save compile time.The -disable-bootstrap option means that we only want to build the new compiler once. If we don’t specify -disable-bootstrap, the new compiler will be built three times, for testing and performance reasons.
However, the system GCC compiler (4.8.3) provided by Cygwin is pretty recent, so -disable-bootstrap is good enough for our purposes. This will save a significant amount of compile time.The -disable-shared option means that we don’t want to build the new standard C runtime library as a DLL that’s shared with other C applications on the system.
It’s totally possible to make C executables work with such DLLs, but it takes care not to introduce conflicts with C executables created by older or newer versions of GCC. That’s something distribution maintainers need to worry about; not us. Let’s just avoid the additional headache.By default, the new version of GCC will be installed to /usr/local in Cygwin’s virtual filesystem.
This will make it easier to launch the new GCC, since /usr/local/bin is already listed in Cygwin’s PATH environment variable. However, if you’re using an existing Cygwin installation, it might prove difficult to uninstall GCC from /usr/local later on (if you so choose), since that directory tends to contain files from several different packages. If you prefer to install the new GCC to a different directory, add the option -prefix=/path/to/directory to the above configure command.We’re not going to build a new Binutils, which GCC relies on, because the existing Binutils provided by Cygwin is already quite recent. We’re also skipping a couple of packages, namely ISL and CLooG, which means that the new compiler won’t be able to use any of the.Next, we’ll actually build the new GCC compiler suite, including C, C and the standard C library. This is the longest step. $ make -j4The -j4 option lets the build process spawn up to four child processes in parallel.
If your machine’s CPU has at least four hardware threads, this option makes the build process run significantly faster. The main downside is that it jumbles the output messages generated during the build process. If your CPU has even more hardware threads, you can specify a higher number with -j. For comparison, I tried various numbers on a machine having 12 hardware threads, and got the following build times:Be warned: I encountered a the first time I ran with -j4.
Bad luck on my part. If that happens to you, running the same command a second time should allow the build process to finish successfully. Also, when specifying higher numbers with -j, there are often strange error messages at the end of the build process involving “jobserver tokens”, but they’re harmless.Once that’s finished, install the new compiler: $ make install$ cd.This installs several executables to /usr/local/bin; it installs the standard C library’s include files to /usr/local/include/c/4.9.2; and it installs the static standard C library to /usr/local/lib, among other things. Interestingly, it does not install a new standard C library!