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digitalmars.D.announce - DMD, Windows and C

reply Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:
In preparation for an upcoming blog series, and partly as a 
reaction to the "Windows is a second-class citizen" criticisms 
that have been cropping up lately, I've put together a primer on 
getting set up to use C and D together on Windows. It includes 
some background on why we need to install the MS toolchain to 
produce 64-bit binaries.

The blog:
https://dlang.org/blog/2017/10/25/dmd-windows-and-c/

Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/78olka/dmd_windows_and_c_getting_set_up_to_use_d_and_c/
Oct 25 2017
next sibling parent reply kinke <kinke gmx.net> writes:
On Wednesday, 25 October 2017 at 16:05:48 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 In preparation for an upcoming blog series, and partly as a 
 reaction to the "Windows is a second-class citizen" criticisms 
 that have been cropping up lately, I've put together a primer 
 on getting set up to use C and D together on Windows. It 
 includes some background on why we need to install the MS 
 toolchain to produce 64-bit binaries.

 The blog:
 https://dlang.org/blog/2017/10/25/dmd-windows-and-c/

 Reddit:
 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/78olka/dmd_windows_and_c_getting_set_up_to_use_d_and_c/


LLVM's LLD is another option for linking on Windows (and 
cross-linking to Windows from other platforms); they used not to 
support debuginfos (.pdb), not sure what the current state is. 
`lld-link.exe` and `llvm-lib.exe` work as drop-in replacements, 
reading the same environment variables and exposing the same 
command-line interface.
Recent LDC integrates both the linker and the archiver/librarian 
(in the LDC executable directly - increasing the size of the LDC 
executable by about 10% IIRC).

The MS libs are obviously still required. They can be compressed 
to ~32 MB. The redistribution of the static libs is unclear, 
that's why I haven't pursued this further, but that's basically 
the only thing standing in the way of releasing a fully 
self-contained LDC package with a compressed size of roughly 50 
MB (64-bit libs only).

See 
https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/pull/2142#issuecomment-304472412.
Oct 25 2017
next sibling parent reply MrSmith <mrsmith33 yandex.ru> writes:
On Wednesday, 25 October 2017 at 16:57:27 UTC, kinke wrote:

 The MS libs are obviously still required. They can be 
 compressed to ~32 MB. The redistribution of the static libs is 
 unclear, that's why I haven't pursued this further, but that's 
 basically the only thing standing in the way of releasing a 
 fully self-contained LDC package with a compressed size of 
 roughly 50 MB (64-bit libs only).


I wish we had zero-dependence distributions of all compilers for 
Windows. I want to redist compiler with my application for easy 
modding. And requiring VisualStudio / BuildToos is too much 
garbage for a small task. (Ideally it should be 20-30 MB at max).
Oct 25 2017
parent Jacob Carlborg <doob me.com> writes:
On 2017-10-25 21:15, MrSmith wrote:


 I wish we had zero-dependence distributions of all compilers for 
 Windows. I want to redist compiler with my application for easy modding. 
 And requiring VisualStudio / BuildToos is too much garbage for a small 
 task. (Ideally it should be 20-30 MB at max).


I wish we had that for all platforms.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg
Oct 25 2017
prev sibling parent Rainer Schuetze <r.sagitario gmx.de> writes:
On 25.10.2017 18:57, kinke wrote:

 On Wednesday, 25 October 2017 at 16:05:48 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 In preparation for an upcoming blog series, and partly as a reaction 
 to the "Windows is a second-class citizen" criticisms that have been 
 cropping up lately, I've put together a primer on getting set up to 
 use C and D together on Windows. It includes some background on why we 
 need to install the MS toolchain to produce 64-bit binaries.

 The blog:
 https://dlang.org/blog/2017/10/25/dmd-windows-and-c/

 Reddit:
 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/78olka/dmd_windows_and_c_getting_se
_up_to_use_d_and_c/ 


 
 LLVM's LLD is another option for linking on Windows (and cross-linking 
 to Windows from other platforms); they used not to support debuginfos 
 (.pdb), not sure what the current state is. `lld-link.exe` and 
 `llvm-lib.exe` work as drop-in replacements,


I tried lld-link just yesterday on a small DMD generated test file. 
Apart from not supporting the /MAP option it worked without debug 
information, but choked on debug symbols.
Oct 26 2017
prev sibling next sibling parent jmh530 <john.michael.hall gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 25 October 2017 at 16:05:48 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

 In preparation for an upcoming blog series, and partly as a 
 reaction to the "Windows is a second-class citizen" criticisms 
 that have been cropping up lately, I've put together a primer 
 on getting set up to use C and D together on Windows. It 
 includes some background on why we need to install the MS 
 toolchain to produce 64-bit binaries.

 The blog:
 https://dlang.org/blog/2017/10/25/dmd-windows-and-c/

 Reddit:
 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/78olka/dmd_windows_and_c_getting_set_up_to_use_d_and_c/


Great post. Small typo in: "https:/www/visualstudio.com."

Most often it's not that I personally have some library in C that 
I need to compile and link to D. I'd rather just use D, all else 
equal. The problem is that you have some code base written in C 
by someone else and I want to use that. For instance, I was 
recently looking at LAPACK
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/lapack-for-windows/lapack/
and you just beat your head against the wall figuring out what 
you need to do. Okay, I don't have the intel compiler, and I'm 
pretty sure a MinGW version won't work. So there's some VS 
solution, but that didn't work for me. So then I thought about 
building it, but if you look at the instructions it requires 
either the Intel compiler or MinGW. After about a half an hour, I 
want to throw up my hands and only use Linux, but I have to use 
Windows at work.
Oct 25 2017
prev sibling parent Rainer Schuetze <r.sagitario gmx.de> writes:
On 25.10.2017 18:05, Mike Parker wrote:

 In preparation for an upcoming blog series, and partly as a reaction to 
 the "Windows is a second-class citizen" criticisms that have been 
 cropping up lately, I've put together a primer on getting set up to use 
 C and D together on Windows. It includes some background on why we need 
 to install the MS toolchain to produce 64-bit binaries.
 
 The blog:
 https://dlang.org/blog/2017/10/25/dmd-windows-and-c/
 
 Reddit:
 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/78olka/dmd_windows_and_c_getting_se
_up_to_use_d_and_c/ 
 


Thanks for the nice article. Two minor remarks:

- the D installer already creates batch files dmd2vars32.bat and 
dmd2vars64.bat that modify the PATH environment variable (but don't 
include the DMC path)

- DMD doesn't need lib.exe to build static libraries, that's built into DMD.
Oct 26 2017