Development environment

MSYS2/MinGW

MSYS2 provides several toolchains, and any accidental mixing will likely fail the building process. This project uses MinGW x32 and MinGW x64 toolchains, and one should be careful not to mix MinGW components with those from the base MSYS2 environment. The official bootstrapping MSYS2 installer is available from the front page or directly.

Let us assume that the “msys64” folder (e.g., “C:\dev\msys64”) contains MSYS2x64, and the “msys2pkgs” folder (e.g., “C:\dev\msys2pkgs”) has cached packages. (While MSYS2 integrates with ConEmu, this customization is beyond the scope of this tutorial.) Pacman package manager is available for interactive or script-based package management from the MSYS2 shell (msys64\msys2.exe).

#!/bin/bash
# While, in principle, after the initial update, the remaining installation
# can be scripted, occasionally glitches occur causing errors and
# necessitating that the same installation command is repeated.

# Update base installation, repeat until nothing is done.
pacman --noconfirm -Syuu
pacman --noconfirm -Syuu

# Change directory to MSYS2 root, showing full Windows path
PWD="$(cygpath -m /)"

# Install MSYS2 packages
pkgs=( base-devel msys2-devel compression development libraries bc ed mc pactoys )
pacman --noconfirm --needed -S --cachedir "${PWD}/../msys2pkgs" ${pkgs[@]}

# Install base MinGW x32 and x64 packages
pkgs=( mingw-w64-i686 mingw-w64-x86_64 )
pacman --noconfirm --needed -S --cachedir "${PWD}/../msys2pkgs" ${pkgs[@]}

# Install MinGW x32 (/ming32) and x64 (/ming64) toolchains
pkgs=( toolchain:m clang:m dlfcn:m icu:m nsis:m )
pacboy --noconfirm --needed -S --cachedir "${PWD}/../msys2pkgs" ${pkgs[@]}

Both MinGWx32 and MinGWx64 environments now have the same set of tools installed. The same workflow, commands, and scripts work with either toolchain, yielding x32 and x64 applications. The active toolchain is selected based on the environment settings applied by the proper launcher (msys64/mingw32.exe or msys64/mingw64.exe).

Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools

Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools (MSVC) is the other toolset used by this project. MSVC can be installed via a dedicated installer or as part of Visual Studio (including the CE version). Either installer provides the ability to choose various optional components. The minimum configuration should include the Build Tools component and an appropriate SDK package. Since SQLite building workflow relies on TCL, it must also be available (its bin subfolder containing the tclsh.exe executable must be in the path). The ICU extension requires the ICU4C library. ICU4C binary releases are available from GitHub.
icu4c-XXX-Win32-MSVCyyy.zip and
icu4c-XXX-Win64-MSVCyyy.zip
should be used. Both archives should be extracted in the same directory (the include folders should be identical), yielding this directory structure:
C:\Program Files\icu4c\bin
C:\Program Files\icu4c\bin64
C:\Program Files\icu4c\include
C:\Program Files\icu4c\lib
C:\Program Files\icu4c\lib64
ICU_HOME environment variable should point to the icu4c folder, and if not set, %ProgramFiles%\icu4c is checked as the default location.

Checking environment
Script CheckEnvMSVC.bat checks the MSVC environment and logs the results. Alternatively, to do a quick manual check, run the following commands from your dev shell:

rem IF ANY OF THESE COMMANDS FAIL, CHECK YOUR SETTINGS

rem MSVC
where cl
where nmake

rem TCL
rem If TCL\bin is in Path
where tclsh
rem If TCL_HOME is set
cd /d "%TCL_HOME%\bin" && where tclsh

rem ICU
rem If icu4c\bin(|64) is in Path
where uconv
rem If ICU_HOME is set
cd /d "%ICU_HOME%" && (if "/%Platform%/"=="/x64/" (cd bin64) else (cd bin)) && where uconv

Also, make sure that

reg query "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor" /s /f nsion

displays at least these two dword values set to 1 (not set by default):

    EnableExtensions    REG_DWORD    0x1
    DelayedExpansion    REG_DWORD    0x1

If missing, either use regedit.exe or run these commands from an admin shell:

reg add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor" /f /v EnableExtensions /t REG_DWORD /d 1
reg add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor" /f /v DelayedExpansion /t REG_DWORD /d 1

The dev shell must be restarted if these values have been missing.

In addition to these toolchains, there are several useful tools for checking library dependencies:

Dependency Walker is a powerful tool. Unfortunately, its development stopped a long time ago, resulting in a significant amount of “noise”.
Dependencies partially replicates the functionality of Dependency Walker, while fixing the “noise” problem.
Far Manager with ImpEx - PE & Resource browser plugin is my favorite option.

I have also used ShellCheck to check shell scripts.