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

A bit late maybe but I managed to compile boost-modular (the Git repository, so should be similar to 1.55 as of July 2014) on Windows 7, using MinGW and the WDK 7.

The steps I used were

1. install MinGW and Msys (bash etc) using mingw-get-setup (the easy way), add bin/ to path
2. install the Windows Driver Kit (for W7 I used WDK 7) -- GRMWDK_EN_7600_1.ISO
   downloading the ISO image and extracting the files with WinRAR worked for me
   the installer advises against installing the DSF, so skip that
3. add the directories of ML64.exe and ML.exe to the path (both required AFAIK)
   C:\Windows\WinDDK\7600.16385.1\bin\x86\amd64;C:\Windows\WinDDK\7600.16385.1\bin\x86
4. open cmd.exe as administrator and start bash
5. in the parent dir of boost, run
   git clone --recursive https://github.com/boostorg/boost.git boost > clone.log
6. exit bash, goto directory boost and run: bootstrap gcc
7. if that finishes w/o problems (if ML64.exe is found), run
   b2 -a -d+2 -q --build-type=complete --build-dir=build toolset=gcc link=shared runtime-link=shared threading=multi

Without explicitly adding the ML(64) directories to the path, I still got the errors about ML.

Installing MASM is not the same as installing MSVC. I tried using different assemblers first but boost is not compatibe with their output.