On 2018-03-12 17:13, Thomas Stüfe wrote:
I wonder how much of the perceived difficulty of Windows as build
platform is really the fault of Visual Studio. I find it quite easy to
install.
But the required Cygwin install could be better documented: I have a
text file somewhere with all required packets, but I do not know if an
official documentation exists.
doc/building.md?
I quote:
Apart from the basic Cygwin installation, the following packages must
also be
installed:
* `autoconf`
* `make`
* `zip`
* `unzip`
Often, you can install these packages using the following command line:
```
<path to Cygwin setup>/setup-x86_64 -q -P autoconf -P make -P unzip -P zip
```
Nowadays, it's actually not more complicated than that. My personal
recommendation is btw to install apt-cyg
(https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg) to make package installation
even more "debian-like"; then you can just do "apt-cyg install autoconf
make unzip zip". I might turn this into an official recommendation by
including it in the build readme at some time. :-)
/Magnus
Then there is the annoying freetype dependency, which soon will be
history thanks to Phil Race (8193017).
Also, installing Visual Studio could be easier by making sure that we
always can build with the latest community version, early when it
comes out. Since it is not so easy to find community/express/whatever
downloads for earlier versions of Visual Studio.
(Just my 5c).
Best Regards, Thomas
On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 11:18 AM, Magnus Ihse Bursie
<magnus.ihse.bur...@oracle.com <mailto:magnus.ihse.bur...@oracle.com>>
wrote:
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/
<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/
<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
