Installing Primer3 - windows

I need to install Primer3 for my research in Windows, and I really have no idea of how to go about it. I was following the instructions mentioned here.
I'm getting to the part where I need to run
mingw32-make TESTOPTS=--windows
and I keep getting an error saying:
'mingw32-make' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Just for reference, I went into the minGW Installation manager and got the ming32-make packages, including the bin, doc, lang, and lic ones, because I really had no idea which one was the correct one.
If someone could help me, I would be very grateful! Installing these niche programs without an installation wizard is a challenge!

You will need to install mingw32-make. This is a
Windows of port of GNU Make,
a software-build tool that is supported on all operating systems,
indeed the daddy of such tools.
But make alone will not suffice. To build primer3 you will
need a Windows port of the whole GNU toolchain for building software
from source code. Without that, running make by itself will
just expose the absence of the GCC compiler and linker that it
expects to do its bidding.
This is quite a lot of software, but it is easy and quick to install and there
are several open-source offerings. I suggest you go to TDM GCC
and download the TDM64 bundle. This will give you an executable installer.
Just run it and you will end up with the complete GNU toolchain, including,
mingw32-make, in your chosen installation directory.
It will also install in your Windows launch menu the MinGW command prompt.
Launch this and you will be presented with a Windows commandline console
with its environment set up to find and run any of the GNU tools.
In this console change directory to your primer3-X.Y.Z/test directory
and then run mingw32-make TESTOPTS=--windows as per documentation.
Be forwarned that the self-tests of primer3 that are executed to
verify the build may take 1/2 hr. to 1 hr. to run, depending on your
hardware, but they will finish successfully with the steps I've
described, barring problems specific to your machine. It is a foolproof-simple build.
All the built executables are deposited in the primer3-X.Y.Z/src
directory. You may want to move them somewhere more convenient
in in your PATH.
It does seem oddly amateurish that the documentation simply
directs you to run mingw32-make with no preliminary account of
what that is or how to install it, while on the other hand it
advises that you must install perl and strongly recommends a
specific perl distribution; but evidently primer3 is open-source
scientfic software and its documentation is not bad by the standard
of that genre.

Related

Building Erlang projects on Windows

I'm looking for a way to build an Erlang project on Windows. I have Erlang installed and all project files, including makefile, cloned from GitHub. I would like to build the project as if I was using make command on Linux and run it. What tools can I use to do that?
I'd try cygwin. https://www.cygwin.com
http://erlang.org/doc/installation_guide/INSTALL-WIN32.html
You can either build erlang with cygwin or use gnu-make in combination with a native windows build of erlang
If you're asking "how do I run make in Windows?" then you can use Cygwin, the newly-available Bash shell, or the MinGW tools. These will all give you some level of ability to run make, though not every makefile will work.
If you're asking "how can I build an Erlang project using a makefile?" then you are looking for erlang.mk. Note that Rebar3 (which is configured with Erlang terms and looks nothing like a make system) was recently selected as the "official" build tool, but erlang.mk is quite popular and is well-maintained.

Linux install command for mingw?

When trying to build a library from source using make and MinGW, I realized (from errors) that I don't have the install command, which I understand to be a combination of cp, chown, chmod, strip, and maybe some other stuff. I figured, hey, someone's got to have a copy of that out there, right? But unfortunately the name of the binary makes it near impossible to search for with any search engine.
Does anyone know of an existing MinGW-compatible version of install?
If you are running MinGW as a cross-compiler, hosted on Linux, (as your question title might be construed to imply), the native /usr/bin/install on the Linux host itself serves admirably; (FWIW, this is exactly how my own MinGW development platform is set up).
OTOH, if you really mean "where can I find a Linux-like install utility to accompany MinGW running on MS-Windows?", then (as Diego notes) you will find it among MinGW.org's MSYS tools; running mingw-get install msys-base will install it for you, (assuming you are using mingw-get to manage your MinGW installation).

setting environment variables for LLVM on OS X

I am learning to build a compiler using LLVM as back end.
I followed the steps on getting started with the LLVM system until setting up your environment
What is the specific location for [/path/to/your/bitcode/libs] ?
Was this mistake cause the command not found when I type in lli in a Terminal?
//I am trying to build a hello world to see through the total compiling procedure
You can put LLVM_LIB_SEARCH_PATH wherever you want. For now, you probably don't need to worry about it at all; as the documentation says, it is optional. Later, you may create bitcode (i.e. compiled VM code) functions which you would like to link into the bitcode your compiler produces. For example, you may need to create some kind of standard library and runtime environment for your executables.
That has nothing to do with the lli not found error, which is the result of the LLVM binaries either not having been installed, or having been installed somewhere which is not in your $PATH.
By default, the llvm package will configure itself for installation under the prefix /usr/local, which means that after you gmake install you should find lli and friends in places like /usr/local/bin/lli. That may or may not be in your $PATH; to find out, type
echo "$PATH"
and see if it has :/usr/local/bin: somewhere in it. If it doesn't, then you could change your PATH:
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
To make that permanent, you'll have to add it to your bash startup files.
But you might not want it to be installed there. I usually install software I'm playing with in my local directory tree, so that I don't have to sudo all the time. You can change the root of the installation directory tree with the --prefix argument to ./configure. (You have to do that before you build LLVM.) ./configure --help will provide some more information about configure options, but --prefix is certainly the most important one.
Whatever you do, don't do it blindly. Make sure you understand what this all means before doing it. If you plan on making a compiler, you'll need to understand some of the details of a typical build- and runtime- environment; PATH and configure scripts are on the unfortunately long list of things you should at least be somewhat familiar with.
As I understand it, some version of LLVM is already installed on Mac OS X, so you'll need to be careful that your installation doesn't interfere. The fact that bash is report that lli can't be found probably indicates that not all the tools are installed, which will make things less complicated.
I'm afraid that I don't really have any experience with installing LLVM on a Mac, but if you run into specific problems (like "my compiler doesn't work after I install LLVM") then you could ask a specific question with appropriate tags.

meaning of ./configure --with-ssl=openssl

I followed this install wget tutorial,
After I ran this
./configure --with-ssl=openssl
It ran so many checks, what exactly it did? Did it change anything in my system?
If it does, then, is it safer or more fault prove to use the package management tool like MacPort or such so that such 'configure' will not be done manually like this or does those tool do the same thing in order to make wget work?
Sorry, I am pretty noob on shell commands.
Thanks
It's part of the build process. The configure script collects information about your system and build options into a local file, nothing more.
Typically, this script is created by autoconf and is used to figure out whether the prerequisites for a build are properly installed, etc. It will collect this into a file config.save and also possibly generate a makefile and/or other build infrastructure in order for make to be able to concentrate on compiling and linking the source files.
Neither configure nor make should be expected to change anything outside of the directory tree where you run them.
Conventionally, make install will copy the final build artefacts into place so that other parts of your system can find them and use them.
See also http://www.edwardrosten.com/code/autoconf/
A prepackaged binary will already have been built on a remote system before it was packaged (though there are package managers which allow or require you to build locally; Gentoo Linux famously uses the latter approach) and is often the simplest way to get a tool if you don't have special requirements, such as building with a specific SSL version, or disabling SSL entirely, or getting a bleeding edge version before anybody has packaged it.

How do I create an executable file with OpenCOBOL?

Upon finishing a COBOL program, how do I compile it into an executable file that may be run on other PCs? I'm using OpenCOBOL via cygwin.
Check out this getting started page from the user manual for OpenCOBOL:
But in case the link is broken, just do this:
$ cobc -x hello.cob
$ ./hello
cobc is the compiler. hello.cob is the source file. The output is simply the file hello which can be run by calling ./hello. The -x option is necessary to build an executable.
However, with all compiled programs, it is compiled for the machine is was built on. It will work on machine with similar architectures, but you don't true cross-platform ability unless you're using an interpreted language like Python or Java.
If you compile with Cygwin, the target computers also need Cygwin, or in particular the cygwin dynamic libraries along with the OpenCOBOL runtimes.
Many times, you can also compile under MinGW, which lessens the dependencies, but also lessens the available POSIX features.
Easiest path, install OpenCOBOL and Cygwin on the target machines, and you'll be good to go, otherwise you'll need to produce release packages with all the dependencies and instructions for PATH settings.

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