Brian Douglas

This is the start of a new blog series. I will be documenting my journey into building a game in C using Raylib.

This post details installing a C compiler and running a simple program.

I'll be upfront

For brevity I have given the post the subtitle Hello World. The unabreviated title is why the fuck is this so hard.

Basically it took me waaay to long to install a C compiler, compile a file using make, and then run that file to print "Hello World". It gave me flash backs to my first year at uni trying to do the same thing. It wasn't easy then either. But now, 12 years of professional software engineering later, it's still a pain. A pain which I have documented below. In the hope that it will help someone on their journey to run and compile a basic C program. Realistically it will only ever help future Brian.

How do I install gcc?

I'm on Windows and I use chocolatey as a package manager. So the first step is get chocolatey installed. Then run PowerShell as an admin. As an ADMIN, remember that, or like me you'll have to search in windows for the terminal and then right click the icon and select "run as admin". There is no sudo here.

Now I bet you are thinking I just run choco install gcc. Well you would be wrong. In windows gcc is made available through MingW. So the command we run to install gcc is:

choco install mingw

make build

It's entirely possible to compile and run a simple program using gcc alone. But I want some sort of build system. So let's install make:

choco install make

The first program I want to run is as follows.

// main.c
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
   printf("Hello, World!");
   return 0;
}

Now it's here I make a time costing mistake. I use the following command to compile the program.

gcc main.c -o build.exe

A seasoned C programmer will see the problem straight away. Not me. The command generates build.exe. Now I run it with ./build.exe. I should see "Hello, World!" printed to the console. Instead I see the following.

Program 'build.exe' failed to run: The specified executable is not a valid application for this OS platform.At line:1
char:1
+ .\build.exe
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~.
At line:1 char:1
+ .\build.exe
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : ResourceUnavailable: (:) [], ApplicationFailedException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NativeCommandFailed

Ok, so the error is telling me that the specified executable is not correct for the OS. So do I add -m64 and make the command gcc -m64 -c main.c -o build.exe? Nope same error. So fast forward 2 hours, and I figure it out.

-c                       Compile and assemble, but do not link.

The -c flag is not needed. So I run:

gcc -c main.c -o build.exe

And voila build.exe prints "Hello, World!" to the console. Now I add the following content to my make file.

build : main.o
	gcc -o build.exe main.o

main.o : main.c
	gcc -c main.c

clean : 
	powershell Remove-Item *.exe, *.o

This allows me to run useful commands like make clean, and make build.

And that's a wrap for part 1. Tomorrow I will look at adding raylib to the project.