MXE (M cross environment)

MXE (M cross environment) is a GNU Makefile that compiles a cross compiler and cross compiles many free libraries such as SDL and Qt. Thus, it provides a nice cross compiling environment for various target platforms, which:

• is designed to run on any Unix system
• is easy to adapt and to extend
• builds many free libraries in addition to the cross compiler
• can also build just a subset of the packages, and automatically builds their dependencies
• downloads all needed packages and verifies them by their checksums
• is able to update the version numbers of all packages automatically
• directly uses source packages, thus ensuring the whole build mechanism is transparent
• allows inter-package and intra-package parallel builds whenever possible
• bundles ccache to speed up repeated builds
• integrates well with autotools, cmake, qmake, and hand-written makefiles.
• has been in continuous development since 2007 and is used by several projects

Supported Toolchains

• Runtime: MinGW-w64
• Host Triplets:
  • i686-w64-mingw32
  • x86_64-w64-mingw32
• Packages:
  • static
  • shared
• GCC Threading Libraries (winpthreads is always available):
  • posix (default)
  • win32 (supported by limited amount packages)
• GCC Exception Handling:
  • Default
    • i686: sjlj
    • x86_64: seh
  • Alternatives (experimental)
    • i686: dw2
    • x86_64: sjlj

Please see mxe.cc for further information and package support matrix.

Build Dependencies

For some packages additional dependencies are required to be installed in order to build:

• Python 3

Usage

You can use the make command to start the build.

Below an example of cross-compiling the GTK3 project to one statically linked Windows 64-bit library:

make gtk3 -j 8 MXE_TARGETS='x86_64-w64-mingw32.static'

Please see mxe.cc for more information about how-to build the MXE project.

Packages

Within the MXE makefiles we either define $(PKG)_GH_CONF or $(PKG)_URL, which will be used to download the package.
Next the checksum will be validated of the downloaded archive file (sha256 checksum).

Updating a package or updating checksum is all possible using the make commands, see usage for more info.

Shared Library Notes

There are several approaches to recursively finding DLL dependencies (alphabetical list):

• go script
• pe-util packaged with mxe
• python script
• shell script