Installing nhc98 under Windows


System Requirements

In order to use nhc98 under Windows 95/98/ME or NT/2000/XP, you first need to install the Cygwin DLL, the gcc C compiler, and GNU tools.

For old Cygwin versions (b19, b20, and b20.1), this involved downloading cygwin/full.exe from your favorite Gnu-mirroring FTP site, and running it as a self-extracting archive. The newer Cygwin release version 1.0 was available on CD-ROM only. The very newest releases 1.1.x are once again available for download. From 1.1.0 onwards, you should download the small utility called setup.exe from a Cygwin mirror FTP site and follow its instructions to install the rest of the toolset.

Along with gcc, you should also get the bash shell and lots of other Unix tools, such as tar, gunzip, and make, which are needed to unpack and build the nhc98 distribution. (It is safest to simply collect the entire set of packages.)

Caution: some people report that their anti-virus software interacts badly with Cygwin, slowing the entire Windows system to a crawl. If you are surprised by the slowness of your system, try disabling (or changing the settings in) your anti-virus package.

We last tested with Cygwin release 1.1.4, together with gcc 2.95.2-4 and make 3.79.1.

Full information on Cygwin is available from http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/

In Northern Europe, a good mirror of the Cygwin toolset is SunSite.)

Some people have reported difficulty getting recent releases of nhc98 to build with older versions of Cygwin. The make fails very quickly, saying that there is "no rule to make target .../src/runtime/Kernel". This could be due to one of several causes.

  • Ensure that the environment variable MAKE_MODE is set to UNIX.
  • Gnu-make's $(patsubst ...) can't handle spaces in directory pathnames - so please ensure you don't have any!
  • Untarring the source package sometimes mistakenly creates directory names in upper-case instead of lower-case. (Ensure you untar in Windows itself, rather than onto a Windows partition from Linux, for example.)
  • Some distributions of Gnu-make do not handle globbing in static pattern rules as they should. (make 3.75 in Cygwin b20 is broken, although the same version works correctly on other platforms.) Upgrade (or downgrade) to a different (working) version of make.


And now...

Once you have installed gcc and tools, the standard installation instructions apply. You have the option of installing the binary or source distribution packages. (A prior installation of Cygwin is required even for the binary distribution.)


The latest updates to these pages are available on the WWW from http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/nhc98/

2001.03.30
York Functional Programming Group