Installing the GAP distribution with all the packages and full data libraries from source code requires a working C and C++ development environment on your system as well as GNU make.

For users of Windows 10, we strongly recommend using GAP via the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Otherwise, we recommend the use of .exe installer which can be found here. It contains binaries for GAP(compiled with the support of GMP and readline libraries) and for selected GAP packages, and provides the standard installation procedure. No compilation is needed, since compiled executables for GAP and some packages are already provided by the .exe installer.

If you want to try to build binaries for more packages, you may install Cygwin to get a UNIX environment for Windows, selecting all needed tools during Cygwin installation.