Re: ANN: GNUstep Windows MSVC Toolchain Scripts

[Frederik Seiffert]

Hi Gerold,

To my knowledge GNUstep already works with GCC, also on Windows using MinGW. 
GCC is not compatible with MSVC afaik, so it can’t be used for this project. Or 
did you mean something else?

Frederik


> Am 19.03.2021 um 08:54 schrieb Gerold Rupprecht <geroldr@bluewin.ch>:
> 
> Thank you Frederick  and David for your contributions to GNUstep. I do
> hope you can also get it working with GCC. The automated testing will be
> very helpful in the future.
> 
> My congratulations,
> 
> Gerold Rupprecht
> 
> On 3/18/21 12:39 AM, Frederik Seiffert wrote:
>> I am pleased to announce a new GNUstep project containing a set of scripts 
>> to build GNUstep for Windows with Clang and libobjc2 using the Visual Studio 
>> toolchain and MSVC ABI (i.e. without MinGW):
>> 
>> https://github.com/gnustep/tools-windows-msvc
>> 
>> The scripts currently build GNUstep Base with all dependencies, plus also 
>> libdispatch. Invoking build.bat from an x86 or x64 Visual Studio developer 
>> command prompt will build all libraries for that architecture for both debug 
>> and release CRT libraries. Each library is either build directly in the 
>> Windows shell (libobjc2, libiconv, libxml2, libxslt), or an MSYS2 Bash shell 
>> is spawned for libraries requiring such an environment (libffi, GNUstep 
>> Make/Base).
>> 
>> I only found usable pre-built binaries for Pthread-win32 and ICU (and no 
>> good way to integrate NuGet packages), so all the others are built from 
>> source. Since building for MSVC is far from standard for projects coming 
>> from Unix (but fortunately always supported in some way it seems), each of 
>> them requires their very own special setup, and required a lot of massaging 
>> to get everything working.
>> 
>> The resulting set of DLLs should be usable to integrate Objective-C code in 
>> basically any Windows app that is not using MinGW, using either clang or 
>> clang-cl to build ObjC code. The Readme contains some info on the required 
>> compiler and linker flags. Hopefully down the line we can also get other 
>> GNUstep libraries on board as to offer a more complete GNUstep package for 
>> Windows MSVC.
>> 
>> (I also took a brief stab at trying to build Objective-C code in Visual 
>> Studio, but unfortunately it adds a /TP flag forcing clang-cl to treat the 
>> input as C++ (just like CMake). I’m guessing there are ways around this as 
>> WinObjC was able to integrate ObjC files in VS, which we can hopefully 
>> figure out some time.)
>> 
>> While many tests in Base are still failing for various reasons, I plan on 
>> spending more time on this in the coming months and will also try to add 
>> MSVC to the Travis CI setup so we can ensure the configuration stays 
>> supported. I already set up CI via GitHub Actions for the scripts themselves 
>> (not running any tests atm.). (And btw. GitHub Actions runners seem *much* 
>> faster than Travis CI.)
>> 
>> Thank you all and especially David for helping me get this working, and 
>> bearing with me through all my messages to the mailing list on this topic 
>> over the last year! I’m looking forward to see what comes out of this effort.
>> 
>> Frederik
>> 
>> 
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