Full details on compiler support and compiler selection are covered in Section 21.1, “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++ (such as by running %VS71COMNTOOLS%\vsvars32.bat, or similar for your compiler version), 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.