Building XZ Utils on Windows using MinGW-w64 and CMake
======================================================
1. Introduction
1.1. Licensing considerations
2. MSVCRT or UCRT
3. CMake
4. MinGW-w64 toolchains
4.1. MinGW-w64 with GCC
4.2. MinGW-w64 with Clang/LLVM
5. Building XZ Utils
5.1. Advanced build options
6. Creating an import library for MSVC / Visual Studio
1. Introduction
---------------
This document explains how to build XZ Utils using MinGW-w64,
GCC or Clang/LLVM, CMake, and GNU make (mingw32-make) natively
on Windows. The resulting XZ Utils library and executable files
will only depend on DLLs that are included in Windows.
The build tools can be extracted into separate directories and used
directly from there and deleted when no longer needed. There are no
installers to run for these and no configuration needed.
These instructions don't apply to Cygwin. XZ Utils can be built
under Cygwin in the same way as many other packages.
1.1. Licensing considerations
Parts of MinGW-w64 runtime are statically linked into the binaries
being built. The file COPYING.MinGW-w64-runtime.txt in MinGW-w64
contains the license notices that apply to some parts of the
runtime. The notices must be distributed alongside the binaries
that have been built with MinGW-w64.
MinGW-w64 includes getopt_long(). The GNU getopt_long() (LGPLv2.1)
included in XZ Utils isn't used when building with MinGW-w64.
The code from XZ Utils that ends up liblzma.dll and the *.exe files
is under the BSD Zero Clause License (0BSD) which doesn't require
any copyright or license notices to be included when distributing
the binaries. See the file COPYING in the parent directory.
2. MSVCRT or UCRT
-----------------
Both GCC and Clang/LLVM based MinGW-w64 toolchains come in MSVCRT
and Universal C runtime (UCRT) variants. Use the UCRT variant
unless you have a good reason to why you still need to use MSVCRT.
MSVCRT is old. 32-bit builds of XZ Utils with MSVCRT should run on
Windows 2000 and later (even Windows 95 should still be possible
with trivial edits to the source code). However, MSVCRT doesn't
support the UTF-8 code page. Under Windows 10 version 1903 and
later, the command line tools of XZ Utils 5.6.3 and later use the
UTF-8 code page. If the command line tools are built against MSVCRT
and used on Win10 v1903 or later, non-ASCII characters may be
displayed incorrectly. Otherwise the tools should still function
correctly, so it's mostly a cosmetic issue.
UCRT is included in Windows 10, and it's possible to install UCRT
on Windows XP and later. UCRT supports the UTF-8 code page. UCRT is
the preferred choice if out-of-the-box compatibility with Windows
versions older than 10 is not required. Visual Studio 2015 and
later produce binaries that use UCRT.
If you want to build liblzma.dll for use with your application,
it's recommended to use the same CRT for all components (the UTF-8
code page issue only affects the command line tools, not liblzma).
If this isn't possible, see the file liblzma-crt-mixing.txt.
3. CMake
--------
CMake is used for selecting build options and generating makefiles.
It can also be used to extract archives, including .tar.xz and .7z.
Download a CMake binary package (.zip) from its homepage:
https://cmake.org/download/
Extract it to, for example, C:\devel\cmake so that the executables
end up in C:\devel\cmake\bin. Avoid spaces and other special
characters in the path.
4. MinGW-w64 toolchains
-----------------------
There are a few choices of prebuilt toolchains listed on
the MinGW-w64 homepage:
https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/
These instructions list one GCC-based version and one
Clang/LLVM-based version. Both include mingw32-make too.
4.1. MinGW-w64 with GCC
For GCC, download appropriate packages from Mingw-builds depending
on if you want to build 32-bit or 64-bit x86 version of XZ Utils
and if the XZ Utils binaries should link against MSVCRT or UCRT
(use 64-bit UCRT if possible):
https://github.com/niXman/mingw-builds-binaries/releases
i686-*-release-win32-*-msvcrt-*.7z 32-bit, uses MSVCRT (old)
i686-*-release-win32-*-ucrt-*.7z 32-bit, uses UCRT (new)
x86_64-*-release-win32-*-msvcrt-*.7z 64-bit, uses MSVCRT (old)
x86_64-*-release-win32-*-ucrt-*.7z 64-bit, uses UCRT (new)
Extract it, for example, to C:\devel so that the executables are
in C:\devel\mingw32\bin or C:\devel\mingw64\bin. To extract,
you can install 7-Zip from <https://7-zip.org/> or use CMake
on the command line:
set PATH=C:\devel\cmake\bin;%PATH%
c:
cd \devel
cmake -E tar xf x86_64-13.1.0-release-win32-seh-ucrt-rt_v11-rev1.7z
Then skip to the section "Building XZ Utils".
4.2. MinGW-w64 with Clang/LLVM
For Clang/LLVM, download an appropriate package from LLVM-MinGW
(use 64-bit UCRT if possible):
https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw/releases
llvm-mingw-*-msvcrt-i686.zip 32-bit, uses MSVCRT (old)
llvm-mingw-*-ucrt-i686.zip 32-bit, uses UCRT (new)
llvm-mingw-*-msvcrt-x86_64.zip 64-bit, uses MSVCRT (old)
llvm-mingw-*-ucrt-x86_64.zip 64-bit, uses UCRT (new)
Extract it, for example, to C:\devel so that the executables end up
in a directory like C:\devel\llvm-mingw-20230919-ucrt-x86_64\bin.
5. Building XZ Utils
--------------------
For a simple builds, you can use the included build-with-cmake.bat
which takes these arguments:
%1 = Path to CMake's bin directory. Example:
c:\devel\cmake\bin
%2 = Path to MinGW-w64's bin directory. Example:
c:\devel\mingw64\bin
%3 = ON or OFF: Set to ON to build liblzma.dll or OFF for
static liblzma.a. With OFF, the *.exe files won't
depend on liblzma.dll.
Example:
build-with-cmake C:\devel\cmake\bin C:\devel\mingw64\bin ON
If successful, the "build" directory should then contain:
liblzma.dll liblzma compression library
liblzma.def DEF file for creating an import library
xz.exe xz command line tool
xzdec.exe Decompression-only tool (smaller than xz.exe)
lzmadec.exe Decompression-only tool for legacy .lzma files
lzmainfo.exe Shows header info of legacy .lzma files
Ignore the other files. :-)
5.1. Advanced build options
For 32-bit x86 builds, adding -msse2 to CFLAGS improves
compression speed a little (but not decompression speed).
There is no runtime detection for SSE2 support. It is
recommended to use 64-bit version when possible.
It's possible to omit features from the build to reduce code size.
There are several CMake configuration options available. One may
change from CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release to =MinSizeRel as well but
it makes the code slower.
If building for multiple targets, keep only one toolchain in PATH
at a time.
6. Creating an import library for MSVC / Visual Studio
------------------------------------------------------
To link against liblzma.dll, you need to create an import library
first. You need the "lib" command from MSVC and liblzma.def. Here
is the command that works on 32-bit x86:
lib /def:liblzma.def /out:liblzma.lib /machine:ix86
On x86-64, the /machine argument has to be changed:
lib /def:liblzma.def /out:liblzma.lib /machine:x64
IMPORTANT: See also the file liblzma-crt-mixing.txt.