Hi Hendrik,
This sounds like something that should be discussed on build-dev, rather
than jdk-dev.
Short answer to your question: There's no technical reason why it would
not be possible to use clang or gcc on Windows. However, the code is
full of assumptions that "compiling on Windows" == "compiling using the
Microsoft toolchain", and it will certainly take a lot of effort to hunt
all these down and fix them properly.
Personally, I don't think it's worth the effort. It's unlikely that the
resulting binary will have any significant change in performance (at
least not any positive one), and it is likely to continuously break
since people will be adding new code with the "windows" == "microsoft
toolchain" assumption.
Question: Is the Visual Studio Express
(https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-express/) such a hassle
to install?
/Magnus
On 2018-03-06 12:17, Hendrik Schreiber wrote:
Hey,
inspired by the recent news that Chrome ditched the Microsoft C++ compiler and
replaced it with gcc/clang
(https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/chrome-on-windows-ditches-microsofts-compiler-now-uses-clang/),
I’m wondering wether that’s possible and desirable for OpenJDK, too.
From my point of view: Yes.
Downloading, installing etc. Visual Studio is a major pain for anybody usually
working on another platform. Whenever I encounter a bug that’s Windows
specific, I pretty much always give up the idea to create a fix and instead
just report a bug. It’s just too much of a hassle to create a working build
environment.
So has migrating to gcc/clang for Windows been evaluated? Is it an option at
all? Would it make things easier or harder? What do you think? Besides ease of
use, how would such a move affect performance?
Cheers,
-hendrik
