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Xmingwin For Cross Generation Applications

Posted by Hemos on from the making-the-applications dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Xmingwin makes it practical to generate Windows programs from a Linux server. This column gives a recipe for setting up Xmingwin, outlines the most important reasons for doing so and shows you how to generate executables for multiple platforms -- including Windows DLLs -- from a single Linux source."

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Testing ? by catscan2000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're looking to replace Visual Studio for programs that don't rely too much on the COM wizards and such, try out Dev-C++. It's pretty fast, too, and it uses GCC :-).

  2. We've had this for years by Stiletto · · Score: 4, Informative


    I've been using a MINGW32-based linux->win32 cross-development environment for years. The same concepts apply as for cross-compiling to different hardware architectures. This is definitely not new software. With properly written makefiles, you can build to target both Linux and Win32 platforms from the same source tree and build environment. Of course you must test on both platforms, but having a setup like this definitely makes it easier to build large projects for both Windows and Linux.

  3. Re:Usually... by grolim13 · · Score: 4, Informative
    No, you're misunderstanding how this works. Cross-compilers have been around for ages, this one just happens to have the advantage that it inherently portable (because it is based on GCC) and targets Windows (which is phenomonally popular).

    Wine works by reimplementing a part of the Windows API. Mingw32 is a compiler which takes C/C++ programs and Windows libraries and generates Windows executables. Its C/C++ support is just about flawless as it uses GCC; it can link programs against native Windows libraries just like any Windows compiler would; and it produces ordinary Windows executables.

    These Windows executables, however, won't run natively on the (Linux) host machine.

    Note that this is also not an automated system for writing portable programs; Xmingwin won't compile anything that wouldn't compile on a normal Windows machine. But if you have code that is portable, you can save a lot of hassle by having just one machine to build binaries for several platforms.