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