DEPRECATED: Version 4.4.1-1 is a new release of the xPack Windows Build Tools package, following the make release.

The xPack Windows Build Tools is a standalone Windows binary distribution of GNU make and a few other tools required by the Eclipse Embedded CDT (formerly GNU MCU/ARM Eclipse) project, but the binaries can also be used in generic build environments.

There are separate binaries for Windows (x64 and x86).

Deprecated

Use v4.4.1-2.

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • x64 Windows: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10

Install

The full details of installing the xPack Windows Build Tools are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install Windows Build Tools is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a development dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Add a package.json if not already present

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools@latest --verbose

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools@4.4.1-1.1 --verbose

For xPacks aware tools, like the Eclipse Embedded C/C++ plug-ins, it is also possible to install Windows Build Tools globally, in the user home folder.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools@latest --verbose

Eclipse will automatically identify binaries installed with xpm and provide a convenient method to manage paths.

Uninstall

To remove the links created by xpm in the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools

To completely remove the package from the central xPack store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools

Compliance

The xPack Windows Build Tools uses programs from other projects.

The current version is based on:

Changes

There are no functional changes from original projects.

Bug fixes

  • the BusyBox code includes a patch around the UCRT bug that affects spawning sub-processes.

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • starting with mid 2023, BusyBox included a make applet, which is preferred to GNU make; unfortunately it does not provides the full functionality and most builds fail; this applet was disabled in v4.4.1-2.

Shared libraries

The dependencies are either linked as static libraries or the DLLs are included, so the binaries should run on any Windows system.

Documentation

  • none

Build

The binaries were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the How to build page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

The binaries were testes on Windows 10 Pro 32/64-bit.

Install the package with xpm.

The simple test, consists in starting the binary.

.../xpack-windows-build-tools-4.4.1-1/bin/make --version

A more elaborate test would be to run an Eclipse build.

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

ddf6a02177d0d429099e6108f51377ec7429c155f1caea62d1acccbf107fe4ef
xpack-windows-build-tools-4.4.1-1-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit x86 Windows was dropped in 2022.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.