Install MinGW

👉   An ear­li­er ver­sion of this page rec­om­mend­ed w64devkit. This was a wrong choice, as its down­load­able files are sig­nalled with virus­es or mali­cious code.

Look at the warn­ing dis­played at the top right of any page of the Bol Processor. In the Windows envi­ron­ment you can read:

The instal­la­tion of MinGW will allow "gcc" to run on a Windows machine. This may not be nec­es­sary if it has already been installed by anoth­er appli­ca­tion. In this case, there will be no such warn­ing at the top right of Bol Processor pages:

Clicking on the "run the com­pil­er" link will cre­ate the "bp.exe" con­sole. After reload­ing the page you are ready to use BP3:

Download MinGW-w64:

• Visit the MinGW-w64 down­load page, go to releas­es and down­load prefer­ably x86_64-13.2.0-release-win32-seh-ucrt-rt_v11-rev0.7z. To open it you will need the 7-Zip unar­chiv­er which can de down­loaded at https://www.7-zip.org/.
• If you get a warn­ing that the file may con­tain mali­cious code, don't take the risk. Try anoth­er file!

Install MinGW-w64:

• Open the MinGW file with 7-Zip, telling it to extract files and store them to a fold­er, by default "x86_64-13.2.0-release-win32-seh-ucrt-rt_v11-rev0" in your Downloads folder.
• Save the path to this fold­er in a text file, for instance (if the user is named "berna"):
  C:\Users\berna\Downloads\x86_64-13.2.0-release-win32-seh-ucrt-rt_v11-rev0\mingw64
• 👉  For geeks and expert Windows users: It is not good prac­tice to keep exe­cutable files in the Downloads fold­er, as they may be delet­ed when opti­mis­ing disk space. You should move them to a suit­able loca­tion like oth­er appli­ca­tions. I keep the Downloads loca­tion for the demo.

Set up the Environment Path:

• Right-click on 'This PC' or 'Computer' on the desk­top or in File Explorer, and select 'Properties'.
• Click on 'Advanced system settings' and then 'Environment Variables'.
• In the System Variables sec­tion, find and select the vari­able 'Path', then click on 'Edit'.
• Click on 'New' and add the path to the direc­to­ry 'bin' of your MinGW-w64 instal­la­tion, such as "C:\Users\berna\Downloads\x86_64-13.2.0-release-win32-seh-ucrt-rt_v11-rev0\mingw64\bin" if you haven't changed the location.
• Click 'OK' to close all dialogues.

Verify Installation:

• 👉   The BP3 inter­face does this ver­i­fi­ca­tion auto­mat­i­cal­ly. If ‘gcc’ responds you will be offered to (re)compile the con­sole. The fol­low­ing instruc­tions are for an addi­tion­al check.
• Open Command Prompt (cmd.exe) and type:
  cd C:\MinGW\bin
  gcc --version
• The first com­mand opens a Unix "shell". The sec­ond com­mand should out­put the GCC ver­sion installed and include 'x86_64', indi­cat­ing it's set up for 64-bit.
  Ignore the win32 seg­ments you see in file and fold­er names. They are there to con­fuse you!

Additional Tips

• Choosing a Shell: MinGW-w64 works with stan­dard Windows com­mand prompt and also with more Unix-like ter­mi­nals like Git Bash or Cygwin if those are already installed.
• Using Make: To use 'make' with MinGW-w64, make sure that pack­age 'mingw32-make' is select­ed dur­ing instal­la­tion. It might be named dif­fer­ent­ly like 'mingw-w64-make' based on the ver­sion. You might need to rename 'mingw32-make.exe' to 'make.exe' in the bin direc­to­ry to make it rec­og­niz­able as 'make'.

By fol­low­ing these steps, you should be well-equipped to com­pile 64-bit appli­ca­tions — not only BP3 — using GCC on Windows via MinGW-w64. This set­up is use­ful for devel­op­ers who need a light­weight GCC envi­ron­ment with­out need­ing a full Linux set­up or the bulk of Visual Studio.