| Building the Thrift IDL compiler in Windows | 
 | ------------------------------------------- | 
 |  | 
 | The Visual Studio project contains pre-build commands to generate the | 
 | thriftl.cc, thrifty.cc and thrifty.hh files which are necessary to build | 
 | the compiler. These depend on bison, flex and their dependencies to | 
 | work properly. If this doesn't work on a system, try these manual | 
 | pre-build steps. | 
 |  | 
 | Open compiler.sln and remove the Pre-build commands under the project's | 
 |  Properties -> Build Events -> Pre-Build Events. | 
 |  | 
 | Download flex & bison from http://jaisantonyk.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/lex-and-yaccbison-in-windows/ | 
 | Download bison.simple in addition to bison.exe . This build of bison is easier to use | 
 | than the one on sourceforge which has a myriad of dependencies. | 
 | Place these binaries somewhere in the path. | 
 |  | 
 | From a command prompt: | 
 | > cd thrift/compiler/cpp | 
 | > flex -osrc\thriftl.cc src\thriftl.ll | 
 | In the generated thriftl.cc, comment out #include <unistd.h> | 
 |  | 
 | Place a copy of bison.simple in thrift/compiler/cpp | 
 | > bison -y -o "src/thrifty.cc" --defines src/thrifty.yy | 
 | > move src\thrifty.cc.hh  src\thrifty.hh | 
 |  | 
 | Download inttypes.h from the interwebs and place it in an include path | 
 | location (e.g. thrift/compiler/cpp/src). | 
 |  | 
 | Build the compiler in Visual Studio. |