Building Boost with MinGW64 without MASM

Question

I tried to build the Boost library for native 64bit using MinGW64 compiler, but got some failures. Any pointers are appreciated. Thanks.

I got the bjam.exe (b2.exe)

Answer 1

Posting this answer here for the benefit of Google, because I've been struggling with this problem all day, and finally found a solution.

Boost context will fail to link under MinGW if built with MASM 6, because it produces the EXPORT symbol.

This manifests as undefined reference to `make_fcontext' even though the library is linked correctly.

Objdump on the resulting library gives make_i386_ms_pe_masm.o: File format not recognized.

The solution is to make sure you're using MASM 8.

You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=12654 - the installer will bitch about needing to have VC installed, but you can just bypass this by extracting the contents of the installer using a tool such as WinRAR; extract setup.exe and extract again to get a .cab, and extract a third time and rename the resulting binary file to ml.exe.

Then rebuild Boost with bjam --toolset=gcc --with-context -a stage.

Hopefully someone googling the same terms I've been googling all day will find this helpful.