How I can build Harbour and / or HMG?

Harbour and HMG both are open source project and it’s possible to (re)build them in your own machine.

But before we need find an answer to the question “why?”.  Both projects has their own binary ( executables, libs, etc ), even setup prg. If you want play on source code, surely you will find building method(s) by digging package.

Making some change in the source code may be educative, useful for understand more deeply the system; but sometime may be also  annoying.

First changing system source files will be risky in general; while changing some place, will be problematic other places, and at least you have make same change repeatedly for every next release of compiler / library.

And second, you have re-build compiler /  library for every change you made.

There is a mymake.bat and win-mak.exe in Harbour package and HMG has buildlib.bat .

And, an excellent tutorial How to build HARBOUR … by an excellent Harbour fan: Giovanni Di Maria.

Anyway, since primary goal is address to beginners, details of this issue is out of scope of this blog.