Building on Windows

As building the GNUstep toolchain on Windows is a bit more involved than on other platforms, we have a dedicated build script for it.

The toolchain is used commercially as well, and can be used to integrate Objective-C into your existing Windows projects.

1 Prerequisites

Before we can start building, we need to install some dependencies. We will be using Chocolatey to install them.

Follow the guide on installing Visual Studio and the Windows SDK from the SDK setup guide.

1.1 Installing other dependencies

Now install the following dependencies using chocolatey:

choco install llvm git msys2 nasm
choco install cmake --installargs 'ADD_CMAKE_TO_PATH=System'

We use LLVM and the clang frontend to compile Objective-C code, and lld as a linker.

MSYS2 is a software distribution and a development platform for Windows, providing a Unix-like environment, a package management system (based on pacman), and tools for bridging Windows idiosyncrasies with the Unix world.

1.2 Installing msys2 packages

Now we need to install some packages using pacman, the package manager of MSYS2. Open a MSYS2 shell (Windows + R -> msys2.exe), and run the following commands:

pacman -S --needed make autoconf automake libtool pkg-config

2 Building

We can start building the toolchain. Open a MSYS2 shell, and clone the tools-windows-msvc repository:

# Export the path to the LLVM and Git binaries
export PATH=$PATH:/c/Program\ Files/Git/cmd:/c/Program\ Files/LLVM/bin

# Clone the repository (you can change the installation directory)
cd /c
git clone https://github.com/gnustep/tools-windows-msvc

Open a x64 Native Tools Command Prompt (search for it in the start menu) and run the build.bat script:

cd C:\tools-windows-msvc

# You can omit the type to build debug, and release, or change it to Debug
# We only build non-gui libraries (libobjc2, libdispatch, base, corebase)
# If you want to build the gui libraries, you can remove the --no-gui flag
build.bat --type Release --no-gui

If no error occured during the build, you can now find the toolchain in C:\GNUstep\x64\{Debug, Release}. To learn more about the toolchain directory structure and how to use it, see Using the MSVC toolchain.