Why does gcc give internal error messages?

If you see diagnostic messages like

../include/wx/ctrlsub.h:156: internal error: Segmentation fault

TODO: Reformat for MediaWiki formatting.

!

stdio.h: no such file or directory

(or another standard header)

This may be occur if you install GCC but not the w32api and mingw-runtime packages. The MinGW installer (e.g. MinGW-3.1.0-1.exe) includes all the basic packages you need: GCC, binutils, w32api, mingw-runtime and mingw32-make. See http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.

!

gcc: no input files

• My executable is sometimes different, when I compile and recompile the same source. Is this normal?
  • Yes, by default, and by design, ~MinGW's GCC does not produce ConsistentOutput, unless you patch it.

How do I specify the libraries to be searched by the linker?

• MinGW supports libraries named according to the "<name>.lib" and "<name>.dll" conventions, in addition to the normal "lib<name>.a" convention common on *nix systems. To include libraries named according to any of these conventions, simply add an associated "-l<name>" specification to the compiler command, ensuring it is placed after the name of the module in which the reference appears.

• When compiling, the compiler doesn't seem to find the correct definitions for a specific Windows version or a specific Internet Explorer version. Why is that?
  • You need to set defines _WIN32_WINDOWS, _WIN32_WINNT, WINVER and/or _WIN32_IE to the minimum platform you plan to support before including the windows.h header file. Possible values for these definitions can be found in the header w32api.h file.

When you first download and install the MinGW Java compiler (gcc-java), you may find that when you try to compile a Java program with gcj, you get an error saying "cannot find -liconv". This is because gcj automatically attempts to link your program with libiconv, which is not distributed with MinGW and must be downloaded and installed separately. To get your Java program to compile, download libiconv from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/libiconv.htm. You want "Binaries" and "Developer files". Unzip both downloaded files to your MinGW directory.