Qt is supported on a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, and can usually be built on each platform with GCC, a vendor-supplied compiler, or a third party compiler. In Qt Creator, a kit specifies the compiler and other necessary tools for building and running an application on a particular platform.
Qt Creator automatically detects the compilers that are registered by your system or by an SDK. You can add compilers to build applications by using other compilers or by using additional versions of the automatically detected compilers:
To build an application using GCC, MinGW, or Clang, specify the path to the directory where the compiler is located and select the application binary interface (ABI) version from the list of available versions. You can also create a custom ABI definition.
You specify the compiler to use for each kit in Tools > Options > Build & Run > Kits.
To add compilers:
To clone the selected compiler, select Clone.
The other settings to specify depend on the compiler.
If error messages displayed in the Compile Output pane contain paths where slashes are missing (for example, C:QtSDK), check your PATH variable. At the command line, enter the following commands:
where sh.exe where make.exe where mingw32-make.exe
If these commands show paths, they have been added to the global PATH variable during the installation of a tool chain based on Cygwin or MinGW, even though this is against Windows conventions.
To keep working with the third-party tool chain, create a new shell link that adds the required paths (as Visual Studio and Qt do). The shell link must point to cmd.exe, as illustrated by the following example:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /K C:\path_to\myenv.bat
where the /K parameter carries out the command specified in the bat file.
Create the myenv.bat file at path_to, which should be in a convenient location. In the file, specify the paths to the tool chains. For example,
set PATH=C:\path1;C:\path2;%PATH%
where path1 and path2 are paths to the tool chains.
Finally, remove the paths from the global PATH, reboot the computer, and run the where commands again to verify that the global PATH is now clean.
You can use the shell link to run the tools in the third-party tool chains.