How to install gcc on windows 10

GCC, abbreviation for ‘GNU Compiler Collection’ (thanks @saphirakai
) (and not Gulf Cooperation Council, like I’d assumed) is a necessity if you (or your pesky college) is into C Programming.

Almost all Linux distros come pre-installed with it so they are out of the trouble. But for those of you who were constant users of Windows and Command Prompt, and never felt the necessity for a C compiler, GCC seems to come out of the blue and a tough nut to install. 1000 rage-quits later, I present you this article.

This article is written so that the installation process is made easier than most of the trashy articles I had to go through.

Installation

1. Go to MinGW official website and click on ‘Downloads’ on the left panel. You’ll be redirected to the site which hosts the files.
   Important Edit: MinGW official website is now down (as of 24th March 2021). Hence, instead of their official website, download from MinGW SourceForge page
2. Look for mingw-get-setup.exe for downloading. Download it and launch the installer. Accept the terms and move on.
3. You’ll now see that the installer is connecting to the Internet and downloading a lot of tiny and small files. Wait till it ends.
4. Right when it ends (which won’t take long), you’ll be presented a window with title MinGW Installation Manager. You should be in the ‘Basic Setup’ tab by default when it launches. If not, click on Basic Setup.
5. Out of the numerous check boxes presented to you on the right side, tick «mingw32-gcc-g++-bin«. If you are prompted with a menu, click on Mark for Install.
6. Then on the top left corner click on Installation > Apply Changes. And wait while it downloads a billion files and installs them.

1. Now you gotta edit your «Environment Variables» as well, so that gcc works in cmd no matter the file location.
2. For that go to Windows Explorer > Right click on This PC > Properties > Advanced system settings > Environment Variables or you could just search for «Environment Variables» in Windows Search…

3. At the bottom «System Variables» panel, look for a Variable named «Path» and double click on it. Some systems show a good UI for adding a New Path easily (by clicking New), else you just need to add ; at the end and add the following path

   C:MinGWbin
   

   (This is assuming you didn’t manually change any installation paths and went with just clicking ‘Next’ during installation)
   

4. Click on OK, and OK and close the other windows. Open a Command Prompt Terminal and try typing gcc --version and press Enter.

   If you get something like

   gcc (MinGW.org GCC Build-2) 9.2.0
   Copyright (C) 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
   This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. 
   There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
   FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
   

   gcc has been successfully installed in your PC. Enjoy!

Cheers and happy coding!

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install GCC in Windows 10, Mac, and Linux.

We will use an open-source Integrated Development environment named Code::Blocks which bundles a compiler (named gcc offered by Free Software Foundation GNU), editor and debugger in a neat package.

Step 1) Download Binary release

Go to http://www.codeblocks.org/downloads and click Binary Release.

Step 2) Select the installer with GCC for Windows compiler

Choose the installer with GCC Compiler, e.g., codeblocks-17.12mingw-setup.exe which includes MinGW’s GNU GCC compiler download and GNU GDB debugger with Code::Blocks source files.

Step 3) Start installation

Run the downloaded installer and accept the default options to install GCC Windows file.

Step 4) Accept the terms and conditions

Accept the Agreement

Step 5) Keep default component selection

Keep the component selection default and click Next.

Step 6) Locate the installation path

You may change the installation folder and click Next.

Step 7) Find and double-click on the CodeBlocks icon

To launch Code::Blocks double click on the icon.

Step Let it detect the compiler itself

It will detect the GCC compiler for Windows automatically, set it as default.

Associate C/C++ files with code::blocks

Step 9) Open the IDE and start using

You will see the IDE Home screen.

Install GCC Linux

Linux operating systems mostly comes with GCC preinstalled. To verify if the compiler is installed on the machine, run the following command in the terminal:

gcc --version

After executing this command if the gcc is installed on the machine then it will return the information about the compiler otherwise it will ask you to install the compiler.

To set up the ‘C’ environment on Linux distributions follow the given steps:

1. Open terminal.

2. For red-hat, Fedora users, type and execute this command

# yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'

3. For Debian and Ubuntu users, type and execute following command

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential manpages-dev

4. To verify that the GCC has been successfully installed on the machine as we discussed earlier, execute the following command

gcc --version

Install GCC on Mac

To set up a ‘C’ programming environment on MAC operating system, follow the given steps:

1. Visit the given link https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action and download. You will need an Apple developer ID

“Command Line Tools for X-Code,” pick any version (latest version is always recommended) and download the .dmg file.

2. After the file is being downloaded on the machine, double click and follow the wizard and install the file. Always keep the default settings as suggested by the installation wizard.

3. After the installation process, open a terminal and run gcc -v command to check if everything is successfully installed.

Conclusion:

‘C‘ program can be written and executed on any machine that has a suitable environment to run the program. Its recommended using an IDE or C compiler for Windows to run C programs. An IDE includes a compiler, editor and debugger. Clanfg, MinGW compiler (Minimalist GNU compiler collection for Windows), Portable ‘C’ compiler, Turbo C are popular compilers available.

On Linux, gcc is install by default and you can start to compile and execute C language code almost right away!

That’s not the case on Windows…

I have been struggling with how to do the same thing on Windows 10 for some time, but I finally succeeded

Here’s a video in which I explain the procedure:

Note: The procedure I describe here will not only allow you to install gcc, but also g++, gfortran, and many other useful tools that you usually only get in linux OS (like ls or grep)

1- What I want to teach you here

If you want a simple way to create programs based on C, C++, Fortran, etc… you will have to install a software with can compile the code you write into code that the machine understands

Such program is called a “compiler”

The most well know compiler for C language is the GNU compiler called GCC.

There are actually several compilers which go together like a suite:

• for C++, you have the compiler  g++
• for Fortran, the compiler is called gfortran

Why using the gcc compiler?

If you are on Windows, you probably heard about software such as visual studio from Microsoft which also you to write and compile C and C++ code as well.

That’s true, and it’s totally fine if you want to use it…

I am personally not such a big fan of Visual Studio because of the following reasons:

• It is huge to download and install (between 10 and 20 GB if I remember)
• It’s a big pain to set up the first time
• Building even a very simple project takes much more time than it should

Because of that, I find that I kind of takes out the fun of programming and seeing immediately the result of what you did…

Now, for large pieces of software, visual studio is probably the way to go

Once installed on your machine, gcc is just a piece of cake to use to compile a simple c language code

Step 1: Write your c code

For example, let’s take this Hello World example

#include 
#include 

int main()
{

  printf("Hello World!/n");
  return 0;

}

Step 2: Compile using gcc

Write the following line of code into your terminal:

gcc helloworld.c -o helloworld

This will generate an executable binary file called helloworld.exe which can be used to run your code

Step 3: Execute your code

Just go into the directory where your executable is and run it by writing “helloworld.exe”

2- The principle

Now that you understand how it can be easy to start with writing C code, let’s talk about the difficult part…

How to actually install gcc on Windows…

The reason it is easy to install compilers and other kind of open source software on linux is because you have a very powerful command line terminal called bash which handles the installation, uninstallation and upgrade of software using a software called “apt” on debian-based linux systems.

On Windows, if you want to have gcc (and the other compilers too), you have to download the source code and find a way to compile it…

For that, you will need to install first other software called pre-requisites which will also need to be compiled, etc…

You can spend several days trying to do that if you are really motivated

I will present you another way much simplier!

For that I will have to install a software called MSYS2, which is an “easy” way to give some linux feel to your Windows PC and able it to install programs almost as easily as in linux…

You will be able to install gcc just with one command line like this:

Excited?

Let’s go

3- Installing MSYS2 on your PC

What is MSYS2?
According to their website, MSYS2 is a software distribution and building platform for Windows

The Website: https://www.msys2.org/

Installing it is actually a peace of cake

Just download the correct installer and launch it with admin rights and you are good to go

Expected something more complex?

Sorry about that

Once you installed it, you will see 3 programs appear in your list of programs:

• MSYS2 MinGW 32-bit
• MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit
• MSYS2 MSYS

Run the 3rd one MSYS2 MSYS to open a special command window in which you can input commands and start to install programs

The package management system which is equivalent to apt-get on linux is called pacman

When you install MSYS2 for the first time, you have to update pacman using the following command:

pacman -Syu

4- Installing GCC and other development tools with the pacman package management system

Then you can start to install gcc and other developer tools using pacman like this:

# Install make, autoconf, etc to C:msys64usrbin
pacman -S base-devel gcc vim cmake

This command will install first a set of development software included in a package called base-devel and then it will install gcc, vim and cmake

vim is optional, but always good to have
(You can also install emacs very easily in the same way)

In the package base-devel, you have 53 useful developement tools that can be installed:

# pacman -S base-devel
   1) asciidoc  2) autoconf  3) autoconf2.13  4) autogen  5) automake-wrapper
   6) automake1.10  7) automake1.11  8) automake1.12  9) automake1.13
   10) automake1.14  11) automake1.15  12) automake1.16  13) automake1.6
   14) automake1.7  15) automake1.8  16) automake1.9  17) bison  18) diffstat
   19) diffutils  20) dos2unix  21) file  22) flex  23) gawk  24) gdb
   25) gettext  26) gettext-devel  27) gperf  28) grep  29) groff  30) help2man
   31) intltool  32) lemon  33) libtool  34) libunrar  35) libunrar-devel
   36) m4  37) make  38) man-db  39) pacman  40) pactoys-git  41) patch
   42) patchutils  43) perl  44) pkg-config  45) pkgfile  46) quilt  47) rcs
   48) scons  49) sed  50) swig  51) texinfo  52) texinfo-tex  53) ttyrec

# pacman -S gcc
   binutils-2.30-1  isl-0.19-1  mpc-1.1.0-1
   msys2-runtime-devel-2.11.1-2
   msys2-w32api-headers-6.0.0.5223.7f9d8753-1
   msys2-w32api-runtime-6.0.0.5223.7f9d8753-1
   windows-default-manifest-6.4-1  gcc-7.3.0-3

5- Last Important Step: Add Executables to your Windows PATH

Now you are able to install all those packages easily, but how to access them through the normal windows command line?

For that, you have to add the two following directories to your PATH:

C:msys64mingw64bin
C:msys64usrbin

To add anything to your PATH in Windows 10:

1- Search “Advanced System Settings” in the search bar

2- Open the “environment variables” window, click on the PATH variable and click on “Edit”

3- Click on the “New” button and add the 2 following directories to your PATH

Important Note: This adds a lot of executables to your path which might conflict with other applications. The usrbin directory contains the whole slew of executables listed above. There is a lot of unnecessary stuff in that directory.

4- Click on OK on all the windows and open a new Command Window and you will be able to use gcc into your windows command prompt!

That’s all for today, hope you understand better now how to install and use GCC and other linux tools on windows!

I will write new articles soon about how to develop simple programs in C.

Let me know through the comments if there is something special that you want to understand!

–Cyprien

PS: If you like what I write, subscribe to the newsletter and help me to spread the knowledge by sharing this article! We all win by learning from each other and making the engineering knowledge more accessible THANK YOU!

MinGW, a contraction of “Minimalist GNU for Windows”, is a minimalist development environment for native Microsoft Windows applications.

Downloading MinGW

1. open http://www.mingw.org/
2. Click Download Button as shown in the picture below.

3. As soon as you click download button on mingw website   The following page will open in your browser (from the SourceForge.net web site).

4. The following exe file will be downloaded with the name  mingw-get-setup.exe

5. Click  mingw-get-setup.exe

6. Click install

7. Click continue

8. Click continue

9. The following pop-up window will appear. Pleas make sure that you selected all the check-boxes. e.g. mingw32-base, mingw32-gcc=g++, msys-base and so on.

10. Click on Installation > Apply Changes as shown in the picture below.

11. wait for the process to complete. once you see successful installation message close the window. Click Close.

12. Now we will set environment variable to use gcc and g++ command from terminal.

Windows 10 and Windows 8

1. In Search, search for and then select: System (Control Panel)
2. Click the Advanced system settings link.

• Click Environment Variables. In the section System Variables, find the PATH environment variable and select it. Click Edit. If the PATH environment variable does not exist, click New.

• In the Edit System Variable (or New System Variable) window, specify the value of the PATH environment variable.
• Copy C:MinGWbin . 
• Click OK.
• Close all remaining windows by clicking OK.

• Reopen Command prompt window, and type gcc. if you see the following output as shown in the picture below the mingw is installed successfully.

Video : How To install MinGW on Windows 10 (GCC & G++)

• MinGW