Installing the GNUstep MSVC toolchain on Windows#
We call the native GNUstep toolchain for Windows the MSVC (Microsoft Visual C++) toolchain, as it uses the MSVC compiler for some projects, and uses native Windows APIs, instead of a POSIX compatibility layer like MinGW. It also produces native Windows binaries.
Clang is used for compiling Objective-C code.
1 Prerequisites#
First we need to install LLVM, to get the clang frontend, and lld. We will be using Chocolatey to install it, but you can also install it manually using the official installer.
In a Administrator Shell (either CMD or Powershell), run the following command:
choco install llvm
2 Installing from a prebuilt release#
We provide prebuilt releases of the toolchain, which you can download from the releases page on GitHub. Select the latest release, and download GNUstep-Windows-MSVC-x64.zip artefact
if you are on a x86_64 system.
Extract the zip file to a directory of your choice. We will use C:\GNUstep in this guide, as it is also the default installation directory of the build script.
You can now use the toolchain, and start building your own projects.
3 Structure of the toolchain directory#
If you are familiar with the standard filesystem structure on UNIX-based system, you will find some similarities here.
C:\GNUstep\x64 contains two directories: Debug and Release. The debug build contains debug symbols (.pdb files for dlls).
$ ls GNUstep/x64/Debug
bin etc include lib share
The bin directory contains binaries, and dlls (objc.dll, gnustep-base-1_28.dll, etc).
$ ls GNUstep/x64/Debug/bin
HTMLLinker.exe defaults.exe gnustep-base-1_28.dll gnustep-corebase-0.pdb icuin72.dll libffi-8.dll make_strings.exe opentool plget.exe plutil.exe
autogsdoc.exe dispatch.dll gnustep-base-1_28.pdb gnustep-tests icuio72.dll libffi-8.pdb objc.dll pl.exe plmerge.exe sfparse.exe
cvtenc.exe dispatch.pdb gnustep-config gspath.exe icutu72.dll libiconv.dll objc.pdb pl2link.exe plparse.exe xmlparse.exe
debugapp gdnc.exe gnustep-corebase-0.dll icudt72.dll icuuc72.dll libiconv.pdb openapp pldes.exe plser.exe
The lib directory contains static libraries (.lib files).
$ ls GNUstep/x64/Debug/lib
GNUstep dispatch.lib exslt.lib ffi.lib gnustep-base.lib gnustep-corebase.lib iconv.lib icudt.lib icuin.lib icuio.lib icutest.lib icutu.lib icuuc.lib objc.lib pkgconfig xml2.lib xslt.lib
The include directory contains the headers for the libraries (you will recognise the Foundation subdirectory containing the header files). The share directory contains the GNUstep configuration files.