hi
i'm not really sure if this is the right place to post this, but i was wondering how you go about compiling programs from source for windows XP. i've heard vaguely about a program called Cygwin, but am not sure if i should download it or not. i'd download it if it would help but i'm only a novice programmer at this point and i figured you'd have to be at least a little better than that to make it work. If anyone could at least point me in the right direction that would be great

thanks =]

Do you want to compile regular applications? or do you want to compile linux applications for windows ? (thats what cygiwin is for)

>i was wondering how you go about compiling programs from source for windows XP.
We could be of more help if you told us what programming language you want to compile. But at the very least, you need a tool that will turn your source file into something that can be executed, called a compiler or interpreter.

most of what i want to compile is stuff i find on source forge or similar places that i can't get binary installers. i was originally going to try doing this for the GIMP photo editor, but i found those installers later on so it wasn't a problem. I'm not quite sure what language i want to compile, if that is even up to me (as you can probably tell by now, i'm quite new at this). Anything else specific i need to answer to help you help me?

and thanks for your patience, i imagine i could possibly get frustrating at some point

>most of what i want to compile is stuff i find on source forge or similar places that i can't get binary installers.
That kind of stuff should be very clear about what language is used so that you can pick the tool. But it's probably not a good idea to try building applications from source if you don't have any development experience. You might want to take up C or C++ with the gcc compiler to get a feel for how it all works.

i'm in the process of taking up C++ right now, despite some older programmers telling me to take C. where do i need to download the gcc compiler?

get Dev c++. Its an IDE for c and c++ and has MiniGW built in (which is the nearest thing youll get to gcc on windows)

MinGW, not MiniGW.

okay, so let's pretend (this would be on source forge) that the "architecture" is platform-independent and the "source form" is .bz2. all i really know is that i can unzip that =p.

sorry if this is excruciatingly painful to be teaching me like this. your help is very much appreciated

If you look at the Project Details section, there is an attribute Programming Language. This will tell you what language the project is written in and therefore how you would need to compile it.