Super-off-topic: compilation of DLMs on Windows

[steinhh]

Feel free to ignore/delete this, but I'm having trouble generating a DLM (two actually) for Windows. My problem is that there isn't a single Windows computer at my institute (all Mac and linux), and extremely few of our "customers" have a Windows computer. Those who do are either not very well versed in "system administration", are not allowed to install anything by themselves, or both.

I have one contact with mingw installed, but IDL documentation is sparse to say the least about how to use MAKE_DLL for that. With the shutdown in place, he can't get IT department assistance (works for NASA) :-/. I've managed to coach him remotely so we get the compilation done with gcc, but now we're stuck on linking ("link" is not a recognized command). It should be possible to use gcc for linking, but there's no guidance on what parameters/options should be used. (The documentation's instructions for how to extract compiler options don't work on Windows btw).

So, would it be possible to give me some guidance on that (using mingw/gcc to compile a DLM)? As an alternative, could you simply compile the attached two DLMs and give me the resulting files? The latter would mean I'll come back to you whenever I update the DLMs though...

Cheers,
Stein
dlms.zip

[chris-torrence]

hey Stein,
I wonder if you would have better luck using the "Git Bash" shell on Windows: https://gitforwindows.org/
I've got that on my system, and I use it as the default terminal within VS Code. Maybe download and install that, and see if you can get a little further.
Also, it might be worth creating a very simple "hello world" C program (totally unrelated to IDL), and make sure that you can compile and execute that on Windows. That will give you confidence that you have a good C compiler and linker.
Best of luck!
-Chris