Target windows XP from Mac using Netbeans and Docker

I had tried building C/C++ applications for Windows XP using my Mac and mingw-w64 installed using Home-brew but it just didnt work out. This mostly resulted in the following when trying to run the executable on Windows XP;

What I finally discovered and use is, setting up a Docker image with the appropriate XP-compatible toolchain, ie. a MinGW that targets MSVCRT, not UCRT.

1) Setup the Docker image.

The files can be found under mingw-xp from https://github.com/plisken1/docker-projects which includes a Dockerfile and a control script my-mingw-xp.sh.

Usage: my-mingw-xp.sh build

which builds the Image and then creates a new container from that image and starts it.

2) Standalone Usage.

The script when used with  my-mingw-xp.sh build does:

(a) Builds the Image:

docker build --no-cache -t "$IMAGE_NAME" . via the function create_image()

(b) Creates a new container from that image and starts it:

docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/netbeans  "$IMAGE_NAME" via the function run_container()

The container can be started using my-mingw-xp.sh run and not by using  y-mingw-xp.sh start as would normally be the case. This is because the container is removed when exited (the --rm switch).

The actual docker command used is: docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/netbeans  "$IMAGE_NAME" where the Image name is my-mingw-xp-image

Note: See the Dockerfile for additional applications installed when the image is built.

3) Netbeans Integration.

A Makefile has been created which can be found in the above repository, which will build a *.c or *.cpp file from within Netbeans using the Docker container.

An example structure for the placement of the Makefile is below;

The Docker command that builds the *.c or *.cpp file is (using main.c and main.exe as examples):

docker run --rm -v "$(shell pwd)":/netbeans -w /netbeans my-mingw-xp-image i686-w64-mingw32-gcc main.c -Wall -o main.exe && i686-w64-mingw32-objdump -p $@ | grep Subsystem

This command also runs the i686-w64-mingw32-objdump -p $@ | grep Subsystem which provides output about the binary, specifically the MajorSubsystemVersion (I believe 4 is Windows NT)

The above command can be run from a terminal at location where the source (*.c/*.cpp) file is located or we can simply build or clean and build from Netbeans.

An example of a clean and build from within Netbeans is as below:

cd '/Volumes/D_SLAVE/My Documents/My Projects/NetBeansProjects/start_up'

/usr/bin/make -f Makefile CONF=Debug clean

rm -f *.exe

rm -rf dist/

CLEAN SUCCESSFUL (total time: 117ms)

cd '/Volumes/D_SLAVE/My Documents/My Projects/NetBeansProjects/start_up'

/usr/bin/make -f Makefile CONF=Debug

Compiling C source main.c...

docker run --rm -v "/Volumes/D_SLAVE/My Documents/My Projects/NetBeansProjects/start_up":/netbeans -w /netbeans my-mingw-xp-image i686-w64-mingw32-gcc main.c -o main.exe -Wall && i686-w64-mingw32-objdump -p main.exe | grep Subsystem

MajorSubsystemVersion 4

MinorSubsystemVersion 0

Subsystem 00000003 (Windows CUI)

cp main.exe dist/Docker/main.exe

rm main.exe

BUILD SUCCESSFUL (total time: 11s)