Building JACL with Msys

Mo Dejong 29-July-2005

The Msys package from the mingw project [1] provides a minimal unix shell environment under Windows that can be used to run configure scripts for many open source packages. Following some Tclers chat discussion, here is how to build Jacl with Msys under Windows. Note that a pre-compiled binary release of Jacl is available [2], so you don't need to compile Jacl from source if you don't want to.

Download the msys and mingw zip file from [3] and extract into C:/ or some other location on your machine. See the included README.TXT file for more info about how to start the msys shell.

Download the Jacl source and save it into a directory. You may find that the most simple thing to do is save the Jacl download in the msys ~/ home directory, if you installed msys into C:/msys then the home directory is C:/msys/home/$USERNAME/.

Unpack the jacl source and cd to that location in the msys shell. Then run:

  ./configure --prefix=/opt/jacl --with-jdk=/c/j2sdk1.4.2

The invocation above assumes that your JDK install is located in C:/j2sdk1.4.2, the /c/j2sdk1.4.2 path is an unix style path alias used by msys.

Then do

  make
  make test (running test cases is optional)
  make install

Running the make install target will install two startup script. The first is called jaclsh, it can be used to launch Jacl from a msys shell. The second is called jaclsh.bat, it can be used to launch Jacl from a Windows cmd prompt or from the Windows explorer.

and it's done. That's it. Have fun.

 $ /opt/jacl/bin/jaclsh
 % package require java
 1.3.3
 % exit

 From the Windows Explorer, double click on jaclsh.bat in C:/msys/opt/jacl/bin
 % package require java
 1.3.3
 % exit

CB - 19-Sept 2003

Thanks, the above was very helpful. I've wanted to start playing with JACL but had been wary of the build process on Windows. This really helped me get going.

CB Here are some notes on Building TclBlend with msys_mingw