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This page presents an overview of the various Windows platforms and the status of the CBS for them.

The platforms are "canonical": we assume typical or often encountered installations. For "bare Windows" this means Windows XP, Microsoft Visual C/C++ (version 2013 and newer). For Cygwin and MinGW this is the suite of GCC compilers. Since 64 bits platforms are the standard, we report the results for the 64-bits versions of all platforms. For MinGW in particular we use the newer MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platform.

Status per 2 October 2017, Arjen Markus, Werner Smekal and Hazen Babcock

Library options | Bare Windows | Cygwin 64 | MinGW-w64/MSYS2 | Borland 5.5 |Open Watcom 1.5 (1)
---|---|---|---|---|---
Static libraries | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes
Shared libraries (DLL)| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes
Dynamic drivers | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .
Freetype support | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .
QHull support | Yes |  Yes | Yes | . | .
AGG support | Yes | . | Yes | . | .
Shapelib support | . | Yes | Yes | . | .

Languages| Bare Windows | Cygwin 64 | MinGW-w64/MSYS2 | Borland 5.5 |Open Watcom 1.5
---|---|---|---|---|---
C | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes
C++ | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No(2)
D (3) | . | . | . | . | .
Fortran 2003 (4) | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .
Java (5) | Yes | No | No | - | -
Lua | . | Yes | Yes | . | .
Ocaml (6) | . | No | No | . | .
Octave (7) | . | No | No | . | .
Perl (8) | - | - | - | - | -
Python | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | -
Ada | - | No | Yes | - | -
Tcl | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | -
Tk | . | (9) | . | - | -

Drivers| Bare Windows | Cygwin 64 | MinGW-w64/MSYS2 | Borland 5.5 |Open Watcom 1.5
---|---|---|---|---|---
PostScript (psc) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes
PostScript (psttf) | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .
Wingcc (10) | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | Yes
gd (png, jpeg, gif) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No
wxWidgets | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .
cgm | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes
svg | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .
pdf | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .
cairo (11) | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .
qt | Yes | Yes | Yes | . | .

Notes:

-   A dot (.) simply means this aspect has not yet been tested.
-   A dash (-) means that this option will not be supported for this compiler, as others covers this field.
-   \(1) The Borland and Open Watcom compilers have not been tested in several years. For the time being we keep them in this status report.
-   \(2) C++ Bindings are in the moment not available, because of invalid characters in the foldername.
-   \(3) There do not seem to be free D compilers for the Windows platform.
-   \(4) The Fortran compilers tested include gfortran, Intel Fortran and NAG Fortran. The main requirement is that the compiler supports the Fortran 2003 standard.
-   \(5) There is a Java compiler as part of the GCC compiler suite, but support for it under CMake seems to be limited.
-   \(6) For support of the Ocaml binding a component is missing - camlidl.
-   \(7) For support of the Octave binding Octave 3 is preferred. The Octave 4 binding is under test.
-   \(8) The support for PLplot under Perl is outside of the PLplot project.
-   \(9) The Tk binding is available if you have an X Server running at configure time.
-   \(10) The fact that the wingcc driver works under bare Windows, means that the win3 driver is redundant. We could phase it out in due time.
-   \(11) Cairo was obtained as part of GTK here: <http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html>

The content of this page is available under the [GNU Free Documentation License 1.2](http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html).
