Netbeans and MinGW-w64

Right, after months of putting this off I've finally sat down and done it. I'll probably make a more detailed post on my blog with pretty pictures but here is a trimmed down SO version which will hopefully be enough for you (and everyone else) to get going with.

Prerequisites

Remove MinGW, MSYS and CMake if you have them and can afford to lose them (we will reinstall MinGW (obv.) and MSYS but not CMake as it doesn't appear to be needed.)

• Netbeans or other suitable IDE
• 64bit Windows.
• EnvMan (optional but handy for managing Windows Environment variables.)

Installation

MinGW-W64 C compiler and MSYS

• Download and install MinGW-W64
  • http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/ (link is on the left menu with a hyperlink called 'WIN64 Downloads'.)
  • There are a lot of versions which can be a bit complicated. We are going with mingw-w64-bin_i686-mingw_20111220 (although the numbers at the end may be different) which basically says we want the version with the windows binaries.
  • Once the download is complete (about 300mb so 10min or so) extract to C:\MinGW-W64 or similar. Make sure there aren't any spaces in the path!
• Download MSYS for MinGW-W64
  • Took a bit of searching http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/mingw-w64/wiki/MSYS is the wiki for it and http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/External%20binary%20packages%20%28Win64%20hosted%29/MSYS%20%2832-bit%29/ is where I found the download and the version I went with was MSYS-20111123
  • Once the download is complete extract the files to C:\MSys or similar. Make sure there aren't any spaces in the path!

Setup

• Add 'C:\MinGW-W64\bin' to your Windows PATH variable.
• Add 'C:\MSys\msys\bin' to your Windows PATH variable.
• Start Netbeans and go to Tools -> Options -> C/C++.
  • Click 'Add' under 'Tool Collection' and select the base directory of MinGW-W64 (C:\MinGW-W64\bin).
  • Select 'MinGW' from 'Tool Collection Family' if it isn't auto-detected and click 'OK'.
  • Set the 'C Compiler to C:\MinGW-W64\bin\x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc.exe.
  • Set the 'C++ Compiler to C:\MinGW-W64\bin\x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++.exe.
  • Set the 'Make Command' to C:\MSys\msys\bin\make.exe.

And that should be it!

I should note that I am using the system to compile a library file to be use via JNI so have some additional steps for that which I missed out as they weren't needed here. However I made a quick 'Hello World' program and it compiled and ran nicely.

Happy coding!