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Installing a C compiler on Windows

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Subhomoy Haldar edited this page Feb 16, 2023 · 20 revisions

Q: What Windows versions are supported?

V uses recent Windows features like UTF-8 and color output support in console, IPv6 and native TLS support on sockets, etc. Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (1709) or later is the recommended Windows version for best compatibility. Previous versions are supported as well, but are not as well tested and may lack some features.

Q: How can I build V?

You will need to install git.

Then, you can install and build V from source (the recommended way of installing it) by launching cmd.exe, cding to your install directory of preference (preferably a path with no spaces or non-ASCII characters) and running these commands:

git clone https://github.com/vlang/v
cd v
.\make.bat

The entire process may take anywhere from 5 to 60 seconds, depending on your internet speed.

Q: Do I need to install a C compiler?

Due to its small size and very fast compile speeds, V downloads TCC automatically when running make.bat, and uses it by default in normal (debug) builds. However, V will attempt to use an alternative compiler (if installed) in -prod mode for better optimization, and installing one of these optimizing compilers is recommended.

C Compiler Compile speed Disk usage Optimizations (with -prod)
TCC (default) very fast very low very few
MinGW (GCC/clang) slow medium very many
Visual Studio (MSVC) medium very high many

TCC

TCC is a very lightweight C compiler. Its main advantages are that it takes up very little storage space (~5MB), and compiles much more quickly than the other compilers listed here. However, it has several limitations, and an additional compiler is recommended.

  • It barely optimizes the resulting binaries, so resulting executables will be slower and larger. That's partly why it compiles faster.

  • It may not be as stable as other compilers. If you're doing C interop yourself, you may possibly find that some libraries may not compile with TCC, but do compile with one of the other compilers; if this happens to you, you can open an issue over in the tccbin repo.

    Please note that the original TCC isn't fully compatible with V, and V distributes its own patched binary.

MinGW

You can get an up-to-date build of MinGW here (recommended), or here. The main benefit with these compiler toolchains is that the release archives are self contained. There is NO installation necessary. Just ~1GB of disk space.

  1. download a .zip file from the links above.
  2. unpack the downloaded archive into a folder, say C:\mingw\
  3. add the bin subfolder (C:\mingw\bin\) to your PATH.

If you want to uninstall this compiler, you can simply delete the folder where you unpacked the zip (eg. C:\mingw\).

Visual Studio

Visual Studio takes up a lot more space (typically 20GB-50GB), but may be useful if you're planning on doing C interop with the Windows SDK / WinAPI.

Download and install the latest Visual Studio. The community edition will suffice. In the installer select Visual Studio core editor, Desktop development with C++, and Windows 11 SDK. Change your selection accordingly if you have Windows 10.

It is also recommended to use either the Visual Studio Development Command Prompt (20XX) or Visual Studio Development PowerShell (20XX) which adds cl.exe and other relevant MSVC tools to path. See the reference for more information.

When you build V from source, use make.bat -msvc to specify that you want to build V using Visual Studio, otherwise it defaults to TCC (which is good for fast compilation). For your own projects, use v -cc msvc ..., optionally with -prod to make optimised executables with MSVC.

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