[Developers] How to build admb source with mingw 64 - finally!

[Arni Magnusson]

Hi all,

Good to hear that the Windows build is working smoothly now. Your efforts 
are appreciated by everyone, including me.

In July, I built both 32 and 64 bit ADMB using the GCC compiler that comes 
with Rtools. At that point I suggested we use whatever GCC is in the most 
current Rtools distribution as our main compiler. This suggestion was 
based on (1) successful compilation, (2) letting the R people [Murdoch, 
Ripley] do the hard work of finding the best GCC compiler for Windows, (3) 
R will be around for many more years, and (4) many people already have 
Rtools installed and in their PATH. The Rtools GCC also comes with gdb and 
some other useful tools.

Rtools is considerably smaller and feels more native than MSYS. If I 
remember correctly, MSYS comes with some medium-size programs, such as a 
Perl interpreter.

Can someone summarize the main pros and cons of Rtools vs. MSYS for 
building ADMB?

I appreciate the usefulness of MSYS for developers, but isn't it a bit too 
large to fit inside the ADMB-IDE installer?

Arni



On Tue, 10 Dec 2013, Grandin, Chris wrote:

> The 64-bit debug build also works perfectly. The 64-bit gdb.exe debugger 
> is included with mingw64 and works with the emacs IDE. Whichever file we 
> use for msys 64 is fine with me as long as it works!
>
> Arni had a problem with us using MSYS, I'm not sure what we can do about 
> that but I think it is more important to evolve the software to 64-bit 
> than to shelter some people from this.
>
> Jon - I have always used the shell because it ensures your commands are 
> the msys/mingw ones. For example windows has a find.exe command, and you 
> don't want your build to use this, you want it to use the mingw 
> find.exe. The source may build how it currently stands in DOS but 
> remember that some future changes could break this.
>
> If you want to try making the debug build, just do 'make debug' instead 
> of 'make' in the instructions I sent out.
>
> Cheers
> Chris
>