有没有办法使用<X11/Xlib.h>和<X11/keysym.h>与MinGW？

Question

I was surfing the IOCCC website and I stumbled upon a 1998 entry named banks which is a Flight Simulator by Carl Banks. I wanted to try it and so downloaded the files but as you may know (from MinGW) I am on a Windows system,sadly (specifically, Win-7 32-bit) and when I tried to use Cygwin and MinGW to compile the file it showed

banks.c:3:16: fatal error: X11/Xlib.h: No such file or directory
3 | #include       <X11/Xlib.h>
  |                ^~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
make: *** [makefile:92: banks] Error 1

and the code banks.c included

#include                     <math.h>
#include                   <sys/time.h>
#include                   <X11/Xlib.h>
#include                  <X11/keysym.h>

Is there a way to compile the file without using Linux?

Answer 1

There is a Win32 port of X Window server called Xming, it is used rather often for connecting to remote Unix hosts.

If you are using MinGW with MSys2, there is a package called mingw-w64-libxcb , so compiling and using X11-based programs can be possible.

Regarding the program itself (banks.c), it is better (though not so straightforward) to compile it for WinAPI directly (yes, I know it sounds harder than simply running make, but the program is rather old and it probably uses non-standard and outdated extensions and peculiarities of the 1998 compilers, so it is better to debug/fix it in a familiar environment, which happens to be Windows in your case). The source code (after de-obfuscation) looks like a graphics program centered around the

for ( ; XPending (e) ; )

loop, which is directly translated to WinAPI's

while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0))
{
    TranslateMessage(&msg);
    DispatchMessage(&msg);
    ... all the code here
}

The window creation and key callbacks are also translated to WinAPI.

EDIT1

---

The program works in X11 on Linux out of the box, but it also requires some data to be fed from stdin (that should not be an issue on Windows, but if you do not have "cat" installed, this will also be required).

Answer 2

When I wrote it back in 1997, I definitely tested it on Windows using Cygwin, so I know it worked back then, and there should be no reason it wouldn't work now. In Cygwin's package manager, you'd need to install a package called libx11-dev or something to that effect (the X11 development libraries), as well as an X server (probably called something like Xorg), and of course GCC and the development tools like make. You should be able to launch a Cygwin X server from the start menu, and in the subsequent terminal window inside the X window, you can cd to the folder where you unpacked the IOCCC winners and run make. (More detailed information on Cygwin is beyond the scope of this reply; I'm going mostly from memory as I haven't used Cygwin in years.)

But if you want my opinion, don't bother with Cygwin. A much easier way to build and run it would be to just get a Live CD for Linux and boot up Linux directly, and run it there. Some Live CDs have dev tools like GCC on them, others let you download GCC easily enough. Knoppix is a common choice.

(If you want to be really kinky, you could try installing Windows Subsystem for Linux so you can run Linux programs natively on Windows.)

Answer 3

X11 is a windowing system for Unix-based operating systems, therefore it cannot be used on Windows natively .

But there's a way to both run X11 programs and compile them using Cygwin compiler. For that purpose you will have to use Cygwin/X , which should contain X11 libraries.