This page has information on how to install and use TinyGo on Windows 10.
We now have a native install for Windows 10.
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: You cannot yet create Windows binary programs using TinyGo, only MCU and WASM targets.
You MUST use Go 1.14.x+ with the Windows 10 native install of TinyGo.
If you have not installed it yet, you can get it from https://golang.org/dl/
Choose the download link for Microsoft Windows, Windows 7 or later, Intel 64-bit processor.
Download the TinyGo binary for Windows file from https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/releases/download/v0.14.1/tinygo0.14.1.windows-amd64.zip
Decompress the file like this:
First double click on the downloaded ZIP file to open it.
Now drag the “tinygo” folder in the ZIP file window onto your “C:” drive.
When the folder is finished extracting, you can close the ZIP file window.
You will need to add C:\tinygo\bin to your PATH.
set PATH=%PATH%;"C:\tinygo\bin";
Now you should be able to run the TinyGo command:
tinygo version
tinygo version 0.14.1 windows/amd64 (using go version go1.15 and LLVM version 10.0.1)
Many boards from Adafruit, such as the Circuit Playground Express, use the UF2 format. This binary format does not require installing any additional flashing tools.
Plug in the Circuit Playground Express board to the USB port.
Double tap the “RESET” button.
Once the Circuit Playground Express board appears as a flash drive, run the following command:
tinygo flash -target circuitplay-express examples/blinky1
The board should restart and begin running your program.
You must install the “BOSSA” flashing utility first. You can download it from https://github.com/shumatech/BOSSA/releases/download/1.9.1/bossa-x64-1.9.1.msi
During the installation, make sure that you choose to put it into c:\Program Files. The default in the installer will not work correct, you must choose c:\Program Files.
After the installation, you must add BOSSA to your PATH:
set PATH=%PATH%;"c:\Program Files\BOSSA";
Test that you have installed “BOSSA” correctly by running this command:
bossac --help
Now you can flash your Arduino Nano33 board like this:
Plug in the Arduino Nano33 IoT board to the USB port.
Double tap the “RESET” button.
Windows 10 should display a notification with the name of the COM port that the board has been assigned to. For example COM4.
Run the following command:
tinygo flash -target arduino-nano33 path\to\code
The board should restart and begin running your program.
If you want to use TinyGo to compile your own or sample code, you should be able to install the release version directly on your machine using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) by following the “Quick Install” instructions on the Linux page located here.
Another option is to use the Docker image. This has the benefit of making no changes to your system but has a large download and installation size. For instructions on using the Docker image, please see the page here.
If you have already followed the “Windows Native Install” instructions above, you do not need to perform a source install. You are now done with the needed installation. The “Source Install” is for when you want to contribute to TinyGo.
Be warned that building TinyGo on Windows is not tested as well as building TinyGo on other operating systems (such as Linux). If you want to contribute to TinyGo but don’t need to run natively on Windows, it may be easier and faster to do development within WSL. See the Linux page for how to build TinyGo on Linux.
You will need to have the following programs installed on your Windows system and configured to be accessible in your PATH variable:
The easiest way to install all these dependencies is through Chocolatey. Install Chocolatey first, and then run the following command in a command prompt or PowerShell with administrative privileges:
choco install --confirm git golang mingw make cmake ninja python
Now open a Git Bash window for the remaining steps. The Git Bash window provides a Bash shell with some standard Unix utilities for convenience.
The first thing to do is download the source code:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo.git
cd tinygo
Unfortunately there is no way to use a binary release of LLVM to build against (like on Linux and MacOS) so we’ll have to build LLVM from scratch. This is a long process which takes at least one hour on most machines.
The following command takes care of downloading and building LLVM. It places the
source code in llvm-project/ and the build output in llvm-build/. It only needs to
be done once until the next LLVM release.
make llvm-build
Once this is finished, you can build TinyGo against this manually built LLVM:
make
This results in a tinygo.exe binary in the build directory:
$ ./build/tinygo version
tinygo version 0.14.1 windows/amd64 (using go version go1.15 and LLVM version 10.0.1)
Before anything can be built for a bare-metal target, you need to generate some files first:
make gen-device
This will generate register descriptions, interrupt vectors, and linker scripts for various devices. Also, you may need to re-run this command after updates, as some updates cause changes to the generated files.
The same additional requirements to compile TinyGo programs that can run on microcontrollers must be fulfilled when installing TinyGo from source. Please follow these instructions above.