How to Install GCC on Windows with w64devkit

Source: Dev.to

Installing w64devkit

1. Go to the w64devkit GitHub releases page and download the latest .zip archive.
2. Extract the contents to a folder of your choice (e.g., C:\w64devkit).
   No further installation steps are required.

Launching the w64devkit terminal

• Locate w64devkit.exe in the folder you extracted.
• Double‑click it to open a pre‑configured MinGW64 shell.

Navigating to your project

# Example: your project is in C:\Users\YourUser\Documents\MyCProject
cd /c/Users/YourUser/Documents/MyCProject

Use forward slashes (/) for paths in this Unix‑style shell.

Compiling C programs with GCC

Simple compilation

gcc main.c -o main_executable

• main.c – source file
• -o main_executable – name of the resulting executable (main_executable.exe)

Common compilation flags

• -Wall  Enable a broad set of warnings.
• -Wextra Enable additional warnings beyond -Wall.
• -Werror Treat all warnings as errors, forcing you to fix them.
• -std=c99 Target the C99 language standard.
• -o Specify the output executable name.

Example for a multi‑file project

gcc -Wall -Wextra -Werror -std=c99 main.c array_helpers.c -o peak_finder

This compiles main.c and array_helpers.c, applies the selected warnings (as errors), adheres to the C99 standard, and produces peak_finder.exe.

Running the executable

./peak_finder

The ./ prefix tells the shell to look for the executable in the current directory.

Passing command‑line arguments

./peak_finder test_array.txt

test_array.txt will be received by your program as an argument.

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