Building Gwydion Dylan on Windows/Win32

Install your distributions

Install Perl for Win32 and GnuWin32. Install the Gwydion Dylan source and binary distributions. In subsequent discussion, it is assumed that both the source and binary distributions are installed at the same root (normally c:\dylan, and this root is implied when a relative pathname is given.

Set up your environment variables

You will need to set the following variables:
DylanDir
d2c will look for %DylanDir%\etc\platforms.descr.
Path
Make sure this includes %DylanDir%\bin. Put it towards the end. Also make sure that the Visual C++ cl and nmake commands are found on Path (e.g. c:\msdev\bin.) Perl and the Gnu utilities must also be on Path.
Include
Add %DylanDir%/include to the include variable. Make sure that this variable also has the standard VC++ include directories (e.g. c:\msdev\include.)
Lib
Add %DylanDir%/lib/dylan to the Lib environment variable so that the linker can find the objects corresponding to Dylan libraries. Make sure that Lib also includes the standard VC++ libraries (e.g. c:\msdev\lib.)

(Note: The variable names are case insensitive)

Before going on, make sure you understand how environment variables work in NT. You set environment variables using the System control in the Control Panel. NT environment variables don't work quite the way Unix people expect them to. There are two panels in that window, "System Variables" and "User Variables", with the former being system wide and the latter being on a per-user basis. Users can provide their own definitions for system variables, but they don't override the system definition so much as they append to it. For instance, if the system variable PATH was set to ".;c:\winnt35\system32", and the user variable panel said PATH is "c:\gwydion\bin" , then the real value of PATH is the sum of those, ".;c:\winnt35\system32;c:\gwydion\bin".

Finally, make sure you save your changes: Nothing's really committed until you press the "Ok" button. Also note that control panel environment variable setting only affect command prompt windows started after the new setting took effect.

Building Mindy

On windows, we don't use the Unix Autoconf mechanism for building Mindy. Instead, there is a Microsoft Visual C++ project file Mindy.mdp in src/mindy/MS-Windows. Mindy must be compiled before the rest of the build process is done via Makegen/nmake. To recompile Mindy, follow these steps:

Configuring with Makegen

Makegen generates nmake makefiles which do most of the work of building Gwydion Dylan. Create a directory to be the root of the build tree, hereafter referred to as build\, normally c:\dylan\build. cd to build\ and
	copy ..\src\Defaults.win32 Defaults
Edit the Defaults file as you please to configure the build. Note in particular the setting of $prefix to c:\dylan. Now, if you have the binary distribution installed and have set PATH correctly, then you should be able to say:
	mk-build-tree
	nmake
	nmake install
And the build and install will complete automagically.


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