MINGW.md

Building swipl-win using cross-compilation from Linux

This document explains the first tryout for building SWI-Prolog and the Qt swipl-win.exe from source using the MinGW cross-compilation toolchain from Linux. Tested on Mint 14 (Ubuntu 12.10), 64-bit edition and targetting 64-bit Windows.

Install SWI-Prolog from source

See README.mingw in the toplevel. The tree starts at $install, which is defined in README.mingw and here is a bit more of the toplevel

$install bin include src pl-devel swipl

Install Qt

Qt binaries for MinGW cross-compilation may be downloaded from here. Download the x86_64/shared version.

The Qt tar must be unpacked such that the contents of x86_64-w64-mingw32/bin ends up in $install/bin.

Now, create a file $install/bin/qt.conf with the content below. Replace <$install> with the $install prefix from README.mingw

~~~
[Paths]
Prefix = <$install>
~~~

After this, the command qmake -query should display proper locations of the Qt paths.

Download swipl-win sources

Clone pqConsole and swipl-win in the pl-devel/packages folder using

git clone https://github.com/CapelliC/swipl-win.git
git clone https://github.com/CapelliC/pqConsole.git

Compile swipl-win

This should be easy:

qmake
make

Now install the distribution files into $install/swipl/bin:

mkdir $install/swipl/bin/accessible
mkdir $install/swipl/bin/platforms
cp release/swipl-win.exe $install/swipl/bin
cp $install/bin/Qt5Core.dll $install/swipl/bin
cp $install/bin/Qt5Gui.dll $install/swipl/bin
cp $install/bin/Qt5Widgets.dll $install/swipl/bin
cp $install/plugins/platforms/qwindows.dll $install/swipl/bin/platforms
cp $install/plugins/accessible/qtaccessiblewidgets.dll $install/swipl/bin/accessible
cp /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-w64-mingw32/4.6/libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll $install/swipl/bin
cp /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-w64-mingw32/4.6/libstdc++-6.dll $install/swipl/bin

At this moment, $install/swipl/bin/swipl-win.exe should work. Tested on Windows 7 (64-bit).