Re: Building Emacs with MSVC

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:37:22 -0600
> From: Christoph <address@hidden>
> 
> Does anybody know which version of MSVC successfully built Emacs last?
> 
> This blog post 
> http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
>  
> points to MSVC 2003 as a version that apparently worked. According to 
> the post and comments in the Emacs makefiles, MSVC 2005 does not work.

Yes, Studio 2003 is the last version known to build a working binary.

> I have MSVC 2008 Express Edition installed and I have the trunk to the 
> point where it compiles and links, but crashes when dumping Emacs on 
> nmake bootstrap.

That's a known problem.  I forget the details (you can find them in
the archives), but there's some problem with the library functions
supplied by later versions of Studio, and/or conflicts with our
customized malloc, that cause the crash.

> The necessary changes to get to this point included 
> various source files, and nmake.defs. I will submit patches for some of 
> these.

What for?  If we cannot build a working binary, why pollute the
sources with more MSVC-specific patches?

> Anyway, I was wondering what the general status of MSVC support is. 
> While working on the make dist target I realized how painful MSVC 
> support can be.

Right.  And since MinGW is available and in pretty good shape, we
decided at the time not to invest any effort in MSVC.