Full details on compiler support and compiler selection are covered in Section 24.1, “Platform Selection”. To get started, on Linux systems, abuild will build with gcc by default. On Windows, if you run abuild from a shell that is appropriately set up to run Microsoft Visual C++ (as by following the command prompt shortcut provided as part of your Visual C++ implementation), abuild will automatically use Visual C++. If you have cygwin installed with gcc and the mingw runtime environment, abuild will attempt to use gcc -mno-cygwin to build as long as you set the MINGW environment variable to 1, though bear in mind that abuild's mingw support is not entirely complete.