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. MSVCRT is the old one. 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). UCRT is included in Windows 10, and it's possible to install UCRT on Windows XP and later. UCRT might be 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. If this isn't possible, see the file liblzma-crt-mixing.txt. If you only need the command line tools, the choice of CRT isn't important, at least for now. 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: 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 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: 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.