Choosing cygwin or MinGW compilers

ATLAS may be installed using either the cygwin or MinGW compilers. The cygwin compilers are usually the method of choice if you are using ATLAS exclusively within the cygwin environment. In this case, all you need to do is configure and build as normal, and the resulting ATLAS libraries will depend on the cygwin libraries and environment in order to run. For 64-bit windows, please note that the cygwin-built ATLAS threaded libraries will depend on cygwin's pthread library, which is GPL.

However, if the user's application uses native Windows compilers such as MSVC++ or the Intel compilers, or if the resulting executable is to invoked direclty from Windows (not in a cygwin window), then you need to install ATLAS using the MinGW GNU compilers, which provide gcc/gfortran that interoperate with native compilers. To tell ATLAS to build using the MinGW compilers, you should add `-Si nocygwin 1' to your normal configure flags.

If you are using the MinGW compilers, configure will try to autofind the correct MinGW binutils, but this may fail. If configure does not work, you may have to specify where your MinGW binutils are installed, as discussed in Section .