Are the VS2008 C++ ARM compilers targeting the WinCE operating system redistributable? Or does Microsoft provide a separate redistributable package (SDK?) ? I am looking for a C++ ARM compiler (actually a complete build environment) for WinCE which I can distribute along with my application for free. What are my options here?
I'd be rather suprised if it were, your use case is rather uncommon. I don't remember seeing them in the redist.txt file, either.
My first instinct would be GCC, as it can target ARM and is also redistributable under GPL.
Microsoft's eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 is specifically targeted for WinCE and it's a free download. I'm not sure about redistributing it tho. Also it's getting old.
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I would like to be able to compile C and C++ code under the Windows environment without using an IDE, just by using the Windows Command prompt (cmd.exe).
I come from Linux, where you are be able to install the gcc package with just a command in the terminal:
$ sudo apt install gcc
I wonder if there is a C/C++ compiler collection in a package inside the Windows install folders, just like the ones in Linux, I just need to install.
What also gives me a reason to ask this question is:
Since the kernel of Windows and the Windows API are written in C, and many of the high-level applications of the actual Windows 10 release are written in C++, it would be reasonable to also directly provide a suitable compiler suite. This is my thought modell, does not need to match reality.
Thanks for your help.
Since the kernel of Windows and the Windows API are written in C
Microsoft doesn't ship a compiler, or the required Windows SDK headers/libs (also includes a bunch of other useful development tools) for Windows in the installation.
Microsoft Visual C++ (part of Visual Studio) would be the equivalent "built in" choice although I am not sure if Microsoft ever specify exactly which version they use for a given Windows build and it is common to have lots of software built with different compilers/versions (including the various non-Microsoft ones).
As well as the full Visual Studio package with the IDE and other tools. Microsoft provide some components separately, such as the Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019.
I am sure this is for many reasons like most users not being interested in compiling their own software, and Microsoft still sells Visual Studio separately to larger organisations (historically to most serious users, but "Community" edition is now pretty nonrestrictive for individuals and small business).
Strangely enough it doesn't come with a C compiler, we need to install one, Mingw-w64 is allways my choice, you will need to add the path in environment variables (step 12), if you want to use it anywhere. You can then use the gcc command where it's more convenient like in Linux, don't forget to open a new cmd after the changes for them to take effect.
Unfortunately, Windows doesn't have the command line tools for installing/removing stuff and the great repository infrastructure we know and love from Linux.
You will need two things:
The command-line build tools. These can be found on the Visual Studio Downloads page under Tools for Visual Studio -> Build Tools for Visual Studio. This will include the compiler (cl.exe) and linker (link.exe) for the MSVC build toolchain.
The Windows SDK. The latest version of the SDK can currently be found here. This page has a tendency to move around, but googling for Windows SDK usually gives you the right page immediately. The SDK contains all the headers and libraries required to build Windows applications and make use of the Windows native API. The Windows SDK contains a lot of stuff which you may or may not need. You will almost certainly want to install the Windows SDK for Desktop C++ x86 Apps and Windows SDK for Desktop C++ amd64 Apps components. Most of the other stuff should be optional, but some of it is nonetheless highly useful.
You may want to download additional packages such as the Windows Debugger (which is an entirely different application than the Visual Studio debugger) or the Driver SDK, depending on what kind of things you want to develop.
Note that even if you don't intend to use the IDE in the end, installing the full Community Edition of Visual Studio is a far more convenient way to get a working build environment, so unless you have a really good reason not to, just go with the full package and choose to never open the IDE.
The built in compilers available on Windows 10 are for VisualBasic, C#, JScript.
To improve speed & performance of apps, "ngen.exe creates native images, which are files containing compiled processor-specific machine code, and installs them into the native image cache on the local computer. The runtime can use native images from the cache instead of using the just-in-time (JIT) compiler to compile the original assembly".
For low level programmers, ilasm.exe (IL Assembler) ships with Windows, which also facilitates "tool and compiler" development; so you could even create your own language or build a better compiler for a current one, or "debug your code at low level and understand how .NET deals with your high level code", or "write your own compiler for a new .NET language."
For web programmers, AspNetCompiler precompiles server-side ASP.NET web-applications, therefore helps application performance because end users do not encounter a delay on the first request to the application.
All Compilers & assemblers come as builtin with Windows without IDE and can be run from "the Windows Command prompt (cmd.exe)", so no extra downloads necessary; located in folder: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\vx.x.xxxxx\ .
Note: C# is based on JScript.
Compilers:
vbc.exe
csc.exe
jsc.exe
ilasm.exe
ngen.exe
aspnet_compiler.exe
Addendum:
If you still are looking for a C compiler to handle some C source codes you already have spent your life on, then (without downloading) you can make/write a C compiler, in a high level language, then optimize it with a low level language.
This guide will "introduce you to the high-level architecture, theory, and .NET Framework APIs that are required to build your own .NET compiler" in C#.
You can to use gcc for windows. For e.g. mingw, tdm-gcc, mingw-68, Cygwin etc. Each of them allows you to work on c/c++. But if you are not sure about the installation process, and don't want to do all the work by yourself, the easiest solution is to download something like dev-c++ or code-blocks.
cygwin: https://cygwin.com/
mingw-64: http://mingw-w64.org/doku.php
Downloadable file can be found here (for mingw, dev-c++): https://sourceforge.net/
You can also install Microsoft compiler. I usually do it by installing the whole visual studio.
I have developed some code under Unix using Cgwin, Linux and HP-UX. Since I don't want to start from scratch when doing some Windows stuff, I wanted to compile the code with Visual Studio 2008. Of course I'm aware that I have to do some adaptions, regarding system specific functionality like using fcntl. What I didn not expect though, was that there seem to be also problems using standard functions like snprintf etc.
snprintf and Visual Studio 2010 or
Error 4 error C3861: 'snprintf': identifier not found
Since there are also many other problems, I was considering using MingW. As far as I understood, MingW is a native Windows compiler right? So I still would have to port the systerm specific stuff, but I would like to know, if the move to MingW would give me any benefit by reducing the number of compatibillity issues.
I'm aware that this might be regarded as opnion based, but I don't want to compare MingW vs. MSVC, I just would like to know if the switch would reduce the porting issues, or if it is as waste of time and just as well stick to MSVC. I have ported code before, but always from Windows to Unix, which seems to have been much easier then the other way around.
As far as I understood, MingW is a native Windows compiler right?
If by native you meant Windows as a target OS, then yes. But if you were thinking about the building host - If you want so. MinGW is a GCC port, and can be built for Linux as well. Latest Ubuntu has both x32 and x64 versions of MinGW, for example.
I would like to know, if the move to MingW would give me any benefit
by reducing the number of compatibillity issues.
Definitely yes. Using GCC port means you will need to solve only OS-dependent issues, and skip compiler and Microsoft library differences.
I want to write an app in visual studio that will work in linux. It's main function will be to monitor multiple linux systems and provide health and status to the GUI... I.e disk usage, bad drives, network throughput, mysql reads/inserts, ect... Can I cross compile with visual studio 2010?
Should I even bother using visual studio? Or should I bail and use Java or C++ on linux?
Thanks for the help guys, looks like the inevitable is true! I was just looking at netbeans, so I guess I will use that. I don't normally write for Linux, so I will just have to plow through it :)
Thanks
If you like the VS IDE, you can certainly use it to write code that's portable to Linux, though actually compiling the code for Linux will be separate. In theory, you could probably configure VS to compile your code with gcc as a post-build step, for example, but it would probably be more work than it was worth.
At least IMO, if you're trying write code that's portable to Windows and Linux (e.g., using Qt for its UI), and you're comfortable with VS, it's probably worth using VS to do most of the work. If you prefer Linux tools or you're writing the code exclusively for Linux, then you're probably better off using Linux tools throughout.
No; Microsoft Visual Studio does not contain a cross compiler for Linux. Nothing says you cannot use the C++ you build in Visual Studio on Linux machines though; you would just need to compile to code there.
As Visual Studio does neither run on Linux natively nor can it produce native Linux code, I would recommend you use the target platform's native toolchain to build your software.
If your goal is to create a portable application that runs on both Windows and Linux, starting one Windows with Visual Studio and recompiling the code on the Linux system on a regular basis is probably a pretty decent approach.
It is possible to use Visual Studio to develop, but you can't create the Linux executable with it - for that you need to use the gcc compiler under Linux. You'll find a few differences between the compilers that will give you some grief, and unfortunately a lot of those differences will be in the areas you're targeting - O/S services. It's a judgement call which would be easier but in your case I'd bite the bullet and use the Linux tools exclusively.
Bail.
Maybe look into monodevelop which is much less nice than Visual Studio.
Netbeans and/or Eclipse for linux are nice though.
Bail, Visual Studio is definitively not the best tool for this particular job.
If you want to code C++ for GNU/Linux, there are a lot of good IDEs in there: Eclipse, NetBeans, KDevelop, Codeblocks...
Also, check the answers on this question: C++ IDE for Linux?, I think you'll find some useful stuff there.
For what it's worth I've used VS to write code that was supposed to work on Windows and *nix. I'd figure out a configuration method for *nix and as you go before every major commit try compiling the code with gcc. Visual Studio's Intellisense and VC++ debugger murder Eclipse+CDT+gdb in every way.
I'm fairly partial to Qt Creator for my x-platform C++ tasks.
Do I really need Visual studio to build c/C++ application on Windows.
Is there any way to have makefiles and get the application built.
You can use any compiler that'll target Windows (for example, MinGW, Digital Mars, Comeau or others). All of them can be driven by the command line so you can use your preferred make utility (or other build utility).
That said, Visual Studio is pretty nice (even the free version). And don't forget that it installs the command line compiler tools, so you can drive it from a makefile as well (unfortunately, it won't spit out a makefile for you anymore, but it has it's own command line tools to drive a build based on project settings if you want to jump from IDE to command line builds).
If you want to stick to the Microsoft toolchain but don't want the IDE, you can use cl and link to build from the command line in conjuction with either the MSBUILD system or NMAKE.
If you don't have the compiler it is available free with VC++ Express.
To install the Microsoft compiler without installing an IDE download the Windows SDK which is available for free.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SDK
Qt is very nice, and downloading and installing the SDK gets you the QtCreator which provides a consistent IDE across platforms, with very nice builtin help, build system, access to revision control, debugging, ... and it even includes the MinGW compiler and toolchain for you.
MinGW is something simpler: the usual GNU toolchain but setup such that it provides native Windows binary.
Last but not least, there is Cygwin which gives you the most Unixy flavour.
No, you don't.
I know you said c, but you can also check out MonoDevelop, should you choose to do more than just that: http://monodevelop.com/Download
No you do not. There are many free IDE's out there, or you can do everything from the command line with a non-microsoft compiler.
www.bloodshed.net offers a pretty good IDE that uses the Mingw compiler.
You can even do without extra tools as long as you have the compilers on your machine. Take a look here for an explainatin:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235639.aspx
Not at all. It is quite possible to do Win32 programing, including OS and GUI programming, with gcc from Mingw.
For all my hobby work, if I can I use the gcc compiler from Mingw (for C or Ada), with Emacs as my IDE and gnumake for my build system. There are good Mingw ports for all the major revision control systems too, including Git.
That's the toolset I used to create the SETI#Home Service, which was a wrapper for the SETI#Home client that installed and ran it as a Windows service, did failure detection and auto restarts, and had a built in web server for monitoring. All that with no VisualStudio.
You can use Eclipse with C/C++ Development Toolkit and with Mingw Compilers. the only problem is that you will not have M$ Stuff like MFC, but you can use QT or wxWindows
Two solutions that immediately come to mind:
Cygwin
MinGW
Using makefiles does not prevent you from using the Microsoft C++ compiler, which is nice if you want to use the VS debugger.
I'm under the impression certain compilers only work for making windows applications.
If you want to develop GUI applications and/or go for maximum portability, go for MinGW for compiler, and Qt Creator for IDE (it comes with MinGW bundled).
If you want to stick to Windows, and don't mind coding UI directly using Win32 API, then Visual C++ Express would do the trick.
If you care about portability to Unix, use the mingw compilers which are based on gcc. Gcc is widely available on a lot of architectures and OS. If you only work for Windows, Visual Studio Express might be a better choice in comparison to Codeblocks.
How about Visual Studio Express? This is a complete package with a very nice IDE.
Codeblocks supports many compilers. I recommend using CB with mingw for general purpose usage.
Depends what you want to do. If you want to use POSIX APIs you may want to use mingw. If you distribute to Windows folks, you probably want to use Visual Studio since its compiler is usually better at producing optimized code.
CMake might be something you want to use if you want multiple platforms - it'll create your CodeBlocks/Eclipse/Visual Studio/GNU Make projects for you w/ all the correct settings.
If you are keen on using Codeblocks mingw is a good choice. But C++ is not like Java. It is not write once run everywhere. Also it is not write once compile on different platforms and run everywhere.
You have to change your code for different platforms (win/unix etc...) (eg: socket programming differs on Windows and Linux)
This means that you are not platform independent. So I recommend you to go for a better one. Eclipse is good, community is great but for me QT or Visual Studio (6.0 or 2008 for .Net) would be better.