Re: ANN: GNUstep Windows MSVC Toolchain Scripts

[Gerold Rupprecht]

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
>
>
-- 
Gerold Rupprecht
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