Jikes with Cygwin

What is Cygwin?

Cygwin is a POSIX emulation layer for Windows. It works with Windows 95, 98, NT, W2K. Cygwin is free software and is licensed under the GPL. Cygwin is a powerful POSIX environment, you will not need all its features if you are only interested in building a Jikes binary for Win32. See the Compiling for Win32 page if you are interested in a minimal compilation environment for Win32.

A Cygwin executable is able to make use of Windows style C:\foo or Unix style /tmp paths. Cygwin programs rely on cygwin1.dll for this functionality, it must be accessible on the PATH. It is not possible to create a pure Win32 version of Jikes with Cygwin, the generated jikes.exe will depend on cygwin1.dll.

How do I install Cygwin?

Cygwin provides a simple GUI installer that automatically downloads the Cygwin packages and installs them. All you need to do is download the installer and run it.

Download the Cygwin Installer

The first step is to create a directory where the downloaded Cygwin files will be saved. This is not the directory Cygwin will be installed in, it is just used the save the downloaded files.

Our example install will use the D:\download_cygwin directory.

The next step is to download the installer and save it in the D:\download_cygwin directory.

The installer can be downloaded from one of the many Cygwin Mirror Sites. Your download time will be shorter if you select a mirror close to you. The installer is named setup.exe, it should appear in a directory like .../cygwin/latest/setup.exe.

Users located in the U.S. may want to use this mirror in CA:
ftp://ftp.nas.nasa.gov/mirrors/cygwin.com/pub/cygwin/setup.exe

Watch out! You may have problems behind a firewall that does not allow active FTP sessions. Netscape running under Windows NT may appear to "get stuck" downloading a file via FTP. If you are having this problem, try a HTTP based download of setup.exe.

Run the Cygwin Installer

Double click on the setup.exe installer you just downloaded and choose the Install from Internet option. Press the Next button and you will be asked for a Local package directory. The default value should be D:\download_cygwin, the directory the installer was saved in. Since this is the directory you want to save downloaded packages in, you can simply press the Next button to accept the default.

You should now see the Select install root directory dialog. This is the directory Cygwin will be installed into, the directory you enter here will be mapped to the / root directory in Cygwin applications. Avoid using a directory name that contains spaces if possible. Our example install will use D:\Cygwin as the root directory.

The default for the file type (Unix) is what most users would want. If you are installing under NT as the Administrator, you can use the install for All option to make Cygwin available to all users. If you are installing as a normal user, you will want to use the Just me setting. Press Next to continue.

You will be presented with network connection options. Most folks will want to choose the Direct Connection option. If you are behind a firewall, you may want to select the Use IE Settings option so that the installer will use the connection properties from Internet Explorer (assuming it's setup correctly). Otherwise, you may need to manually enter your sites Use HTTP/FTP proxy options.

You are now presented with a Cygwin mirror list. If you don't know which mirror is closest to you, the ftp.freesoftware.com is a reasonable default.

Once the mirror is selected, a dialog box displays the packages available in the Cygwin distribution. You will have to decide which packages to install. Be sure to install the compiler and libiconv if you want to build Jikes with encoding support.

Once the package list is selected, press Next to start the download and install process.

Once the installer has downloaded and installed all the packages, it will ask if you want to create a start menu entry and a desktop shortcut.

We suggest adding the start menu entry, it would be installed as:

Start > Programs > Cygnus Solutions > Cygwin Bash Shell

Selecting this menu option will start the Cygwin bash shell. UNIX users will already be familiar with the shell interface. Windows users should not fear, bash is basically the same as a DOS prompt except that it supports Cygwin paths and TAB completion. To learn more about bash see the following Bash Tutorial.

Compiling Jikes under Cygwin

This section explains how to build a Jikes executable which will run under the Cygwin environment.

What is "a Cygwin Jikes" ? It means that the generated jikes.exe depends on Cygwin components to run, and more specifically on cygwin1.dll: it will run only on Win32 systems where Cygwin is installed and available in the PATH, or when run from a Cygwin shell.

The build environment configuration and build process are quite straightforward, as everything is detected automatically for you:

Now build jikes.exe by running make:

Debugging Jikes with gdb

If you are interested in debugging your Cygwin Jikes, you can use the Insight GUI front end to GDB:

That will start up Insight in GUI mode. If you want to run in plain gdb command line mode just use: