2.6 KiB
Portable C and C++ Development Kit for x64 Windows
This is a Dockerfile that builds a small, portable development suite for writing C and C++ applications on and for x64 Windows. Docker is not needed to use the tools themselves. It's merely used as reliable, clean environment for compilation and linking. Included tools:
- Mingw-w64 GCC : compilers, linker, assembler
- GNU Make : standard build tool
- busybox-w32 : standard unix utilities, including sh
- Vim
- NASM
Build
First build the image, then run it to produce a release .zip file:
docker build -t w64devkit .
docker run --rm w64devkit >w64devkit.zip
Usage
The final .zip file contains tools in a typical unix-like configuration.
Unzip the contents anywhere and add its bin/ directory to your path.
For example, while inside a console or batch script:
set PATH=c:\path\to\w64devkit\bin;%PATH%
Then to access a small unix environment:
busybox sh -l
This will expose the rest of busybox's commands without further action.
However, the unix environment will not be available to other tools such
as make without "installing" BusyBox into the bin/ directory:
busybox --install
Notes
Due to an old GCC bug, we must build a cross-compiler to cross-compile GCC itself because, due to host contamination, GCC can only be correctly and safely cross-compiled by a matching version.
Since the development kit is intended to be flexible, light, and portable — i.e. run from anywhere, in place, and no installation is necessary — the binaries are all optimized for size, not speed.
I'd love to include Git, but unfortunately Git's build system is a disaster and doesn't support cross-compilation. It's also got weird dependencies like Perl. Git may be a fantastic and wonderful tool, but it's also kind of a mess.
It would be nice to have a better shell like Bash. BusyBox Ash is limited, and the Windows port is pretty quirky. Unfortunately Bash's build system is a total mess and does not support cross-compilation.
Since the build environment is so stable and predicable, it would be great for the .zip to be reproducible, i.e. builds by different people are bit-for-bit identical. There are multiple reasons why this is not currently the case, the least of which are timestamps in the .zip file.