Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Win32 Information

This page provides a repository for information about building EPICS under Microsoft's Win32 environment (Windows NT, 2000 or XP; Vista not tested). If you find any other information that ought to go on this page, please let me know.

There is a similar page to this at KEK which goes into more detail and shows some older compilers and different versions of Base.

Compilers and Build tools

EPICS can be built on Windows using Cygwin with the GCC compiler (this is probably the simplest approach), or using some Cygwin tools along with Microsoft's commercial Visual C++ compiler or their free Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition.

Pure Cygwin with GCC (cygwin-x86)

Download the Cygwin Installer and run it. When installing Cygwin to use with GCC, you may set the "Default Text File Type" to be either Unix or DOS depending on whether you expect to use other Windows-specific tools with this installation or not.

You will need to select at least the following Cygwin packages for installation:

• gcc-core
• gcc-g++
• make
• perl

The installer will add extra packages on which the above depend automatically. In addition to the above, the following packages are often useful to have:

• cvs
• gdb
• openssh
• readline
• vim

After the packages have been installed, use WinZip or the cygwin tar program to extract EPICS Base as well. At this point the only thing you need to do to build Base is to open a Cygwin bash shell window, set EPICS_HOST_ARCH and run make in the top level directory of Base:

$ export EPICS_HOST_ARCH=cygwin-x86
$ cd epics/base
$ make
...

Cygwin with Microsoft Compiler (win32-x86)

Install the Microsoft compiler:

• Visual C++

In addition to the compiler, EPICS also needs the free build tools from

• The Cygwin Installer
• Perl
• GNU Make

When installing cygwin to use with a Microsoft compiler, you must set the "Default Text File Type" to be DOS.

In order to extract the files from the EPICS distribution on a Windows system, you also need either a copy of WinZip or an equivalent program, or the following Cygwin packages:

• Tar
• Unzip

If you are cross-compiling for a vxWorks target you will obviously need to have Tornado installed as well.