On Microsoft Windows, wxWidgets has a different set of makefiles for each compiler, because each compiler's 'make' tool is slightly different. Popular Windows compilers that we cater for, and the corresponding makefile extensions, include: Microsoft Visual C++ (.vc), Borland C++ (.bcc), OpenWatcom C++ (.wat) and MinGW/Cygwin (.gcc). Makefiles are provided for the wxWidgets library itself, samples, demos, and utilities.
On Linux, Mac and OS/2, you use the 'configure' command to generate the necessary makefiles. You should also use this method when building with MinGW/Cygwin on Windows.
We also provide project files for some compilers, such as Microsoft VC++. However, we recommend using makefiles to build the wxWidgets library itself, because makefiles can be more powerful and less manual intervention is required.
On Windows using a compiler other than MinGW/Cygwin, you would build the wxWidgets library from the build/msw directory which contains the relevant makefiles.
On Windows using MinGW/Cygwin, and on Unix, MacOS X and OS/2, you invoke 'configure' (found in the top-level of the wxWidgets source hierarchy), from within a suitable empty directory for containing makefiles, object files and libraries.
For details on using makefiles, configure, and project files, please see docs/xxx/install.txt in your distribution, where xxx is the platform of interest, such as msw, gtk, x11, mac.