Building the Boost libraries on Windows

This utility is used to compile the Boost libraries.

Get the source tarball from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/boost/boost-jam/3.1.17/boost-jam-3.1.17.tgz; once you have it, it's a simple matter of running the build script (which will automatically detect MinGW) and installing the resulting executable:

$ sh ./build.sh
$ cp bin.ntx86/bjam.exe /mingw/bin
$ which bjam
/mingw/bjam.exe
$ bjam -v       
Boost.Jam  Version 3.1.17. OS=NT.
   Copyright 1993-2002 Christopher Seiwald and Perforce Software, Inc.  
   Copyright 2001 David Turner.
   Copyright 2001-2004 David Abrahams.
   Copyright 2002-2008 Rene Rivera.
   Copyright 2003-2008 Vladimir Prus.

Download the main Boost libraries from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/boost/boost and extract them somewhere convenient.

Let's see what we've got:

$ bjam --show-libraries
The following libraries require building:
    - date_time
    - filesystem
    - graph
    - graph_parallel
    - iostreams
    - math
    - mpi
    - program_options
    - python
    - regex
    - serialization
    - signals
    - system
    - test
    - thread
    - wave

Jam will detect that you're running Windows and (rather then check what's available) assume that you want to use the MSVC toolchain; you have to force it to use gcc instead. You should also use a separate build directory; it will make it easier to clean up if you make a mistake and need to start over.

In principle, you could use the following command to build Boost:

$ bjam toolset=gcc --prefix=/opt/boost --build-dir=obj --layout=system stage

If you do, though, you will get warnings about several components due to missing compiler features (e.g. wchar for Boost.Serialization) and / or third-party components (e.g. Python for Boost.Python).

$ bjam toolset=gcc variant=release link=shared threading=multi \
     --prefix=/c/met.no --build-dir=obj --layout=tagged \
     --without-graph --without-graph_parallel --without-mpi \
     --without-python --without-serialization \
     stage

To install the result, run the exact same command, but with install instead of stage:

$ bjam toolset=gcc variant=release link=shared threading=multi \
     --prefix=/c/met.no --build-dir=obj --layout=tagged \
     --without-graph --without-graph_parallel --without-mpi \
     --without-python --without-serialization \
     install