How to install C compiler on Windows
MinGW
You can get an up-to-date build of MinGW here (recommended), or here. The main benefit with these compiler toolchains is that the release archives are self-contained. There is no installation necessary. Just ~1GB of disk space.
- Download a .zip file from the links above.
- Unpack the downloaded archive into a folder, for example in
C:\mingw\. - Add the
binsubfolder (C:\mingw\bin\) to your PATH.
If you want to uninstall this compiler, you can simply delete the folder where you unpacked the
zip (eg. C:\mingw\).
Visual Studio
Visual Studio takes up a lot more space (typically 20GB-50GB), but may be useful if you're planning on doing C interop with the Windows SDK / WinAPI.
Download and install the latest Visual Studio.
The community edition will suffice.
In the installer select Visual Studio core editor, Desktop development with C++,
and Windows 11 SDK.
Change your selection accordingly if you have Windows 10.
It is also recommended to use either the Visual Studio Development Command Prompt (20XX) or Visual
Studio Development PowerShell (20XX) which adds cl.exe and other relevant MSVC tools to PATH.
See the
reference
for more information.
When you build V from source, use make.bat -msvc to specify that you want to build V using Visual
Studio, otherwise it defaults to TCC (which is good for fast compilation).
For your own projects, use v -cc msvc ..., optionally with -prod to make optimised executables
with MSVC.