# Building SWI-Prolog for MS-Windows using MinGW

The [MinGW](http://www.mingw.org) compiler suite is a port of GCC that
targets the Windows platform. Unlike Cygwin which comes with an
extensive POSIX runtime emulation, MinGW targets the native Windows API
including MSVCRT (The MSVC runtime library that provides some POSIX
capabilities).

MinGW is distributed as a cross-compiler for many Linux distributions
and can be used under MSYS, _|"a collection of GNU utilities such as
bash, make, gawk and grep to allow building of applications and programs
which depend on traditionally UNIX tools to be present. It is intended
to supplement MinGW and the deficiencies of the cmd shell."|_.

Building SWI-Prolog for MS-Windows under Linux is supported using
[Docker](https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/docker-swipl-build-mingw)

## Building on Windows itself

According to Matthias Gondon most of the system can be build on Windows
as follows:

  - install msys2 from msys2.org
  - ``pacman -Syu``
  - ``pacman -Syu``
  - ``pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake git make mingw-w64-x86_64-libjpeg mingw-w64-x86_64-xpm-nox mingw-w64-x86_64-libyaml mingw-w64-x86_64-diffutils mingw-w64-x86_64-pcre mingw-w64-x86_64-db libdb-devel``
  - ``ftp: download libuuid-1.6.2.tar.gz from ftp (dot) ossp (dot) org/pkg/lib/uuid/, configure --prefix=/usr/local, make, make install, ignore the error relating to strip.exe``
  - ``git clone https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/swipl-devel.git``
  - ``cd swipl-devel``
  - ``git submodule update --init``
  - ``mkdir build``
  - ``cd build``
  - ``cmake -DMINGW_ROOT=/mingw64 -DLIBUUID_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/local/include -DUUID_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/libuuid.a -DBDB_LIBRARY=/mingw64/bin/libdb-6.0.dll -DINSTALL_DOCUMENTATION=OFF -DSWIPL_PACKAGES_X=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr/local -G "MSYS Makefiles" ..``
  - only dot dot in the previous line, and avoid "typographic" quotation marks
  - ``make``
  - ``make install``
  - ``swipl``

See this [post on Discourse](https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/t/compiling-with-msys2/3936/4)

@see [Daily builds](</download/daily/bin/>)