Appendix C. The minimalist GNU for Windows and OpenCL
Microsoft’s Visual Studio is a popular tool for coding and compiling Windows applications, but throughout academia and commercial supercomputing, you’ll see a greater focus on GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) build tools such as gcc (GNU Compiler Collection). These tools are installed automatically on Mac OS and Linux, but Windows users can only access them by installing special packages.
Two such packages are Cygwin or MinGW (the Minimalist GNU for Windows). Cygwin gives you a wide range of GNU-based applications, whereas MinGW provides only the essential GNU tools needed to compile C/C++ code. The goal of this appendix is to show how to install MinGW, how to configure its build process using makefiles, and how to use MinGW to build OpenCL-based applications.
Mac OS and Linux developers may find MinGW helpful because it makes it possible to build native Windows applications without Windows. But this discussion is directed toward Windows users who want to access GNU build tools without installing Linux or buying a Mac. Therefore, the first topic discusses how to install MinGW on the Windows operating system.