CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowslinuxcross-platformcompilation
Nathan Fellman
Nathan Fellman

Reputation: 127598

Is it possible to compile Windows binaries on a Linux machine?

At my work, all of the project data resides on an NFS that is accessible from both Linux and Windows machines (using Samba). All of the work is done on Linux, but I'm toying with the idea of compiling some of tools for Windows so that I can debug with Visual Studio.

I already have a nice makefile that can build the code for both 32-bit or 64-bit Linux using different targets. Assuming I have Windows versions of all the external libraries somewhere on the NFS, and assuming the code is clean enough to compile under Windows, is it possible to compile and link my program for Windows using the existing makefile, on Linux? Ideally I'd like to call the makefile once and have it build all three of 32-bit Linux, 64-bit Linux and Windows.

An added plus would be the option to compile it with any Visual Studio metadata to make it easy to debug.

Upvotes: 8

Views: 8615

Answers (3)

SomeUser
SomeUser

Reputation: 2041

You need a cross-compilation package. You can also use the Wine lib.

Upvotes: 1

Sobe
Sobe

Reputation: 101

Yes, you can achieve that with MinGW for example.

However, you will probably have to adapt one or two options in your makefile.

Upvotes: 4

Clifford
Clifford

Reputation: 93556

There are a number of possibilities I can think of:

  • You might try running Visual Studio under Wine. If Visual Studio does not run, you may still be able to run the command-line tools.

  • Run a full installation of Windows in a Virtual Machine. I have done this with Linux on Windows, but not the other way around, but I am certain that it is possible.

  • Use VNC to access a separate Windows PC from the Linux PC

  • Use a cross-build of GCC instead of Visual Studio

Upvotes: 1

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