• Johan Engelen (25/25) Feb 23 2015 I've successfully built LDC using MinGW64 for x86_64 [1], and can
• Kagamin (3/3) Feb 24 2015 AFAIK, mingw is just a compiler, linker and headers, it uses msvc
• Benjamin Thaut (9/9) Feb 24 2015 I personally think that putting time into the MSVC target would
• kinke (11/21) Feb 26 2015 I fully agree.
• Johan Engelen (1/1) Feb 26 2015 OK, thanks for the feedback. I will use MSVC then :)

"Johan Engelen" <j j.nl> writes:

I've successfully built LDC using MinGW64 for x86_64 [1], and can
now execute a simple Hello World program. My patches to LDC's
druntime were very quickly merged, thanks Kai!

Unfortunately, many tests fail because of missing symbols when
linking. To fix this, I'd have to make more changes to druntime
(I fear that a lot of small patch ups are required), adding
special cases for MinGW/Windows. I'm wondering if I am doing
something that is pretty useless...
It seems to me that druntime assumes MSVC everywhere, and I do
not know if MinGW support is desired. For example, in
druntime/src/core/stdc/fenv.d the fenv_t struct defined for
Windows is completely different from the one in MinGW32 and
MinGW64's header files; I guess that means that no-one is using
MinGW?

I no longer know why I do not just use MSVC to build LDC. [2]
Is there a good reason one would use MinGW64 over MSVC? :)

Thanks for your comments,
    Johan


[1]
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%20targetting%20Win64/Personal%20Builds/mingw-builds/4.9.2/threads-posix/seh/x86_64-4.9.2-release-posix-seh-rt_v3-rev1.7z

[2] I come from Inkscape development. For Inkscape, we provide
pre-built binaries on Windows, so one can get going really
quickly without the pains of compiling all dependencies (a lot).
These binaries are compiled using... MinGW, hence so far I have
only used MinGW and not MSVC.

"Kagamin" <spam here.lot> writes:

AFAIK, mingw is just a compiler, linker and headers, it uses msvc 
libraries too. It has its own libraries too, but only if you 
really need them.

"Benjamin Thaut" <code benjamin-thaut.de> writes:

I personally think that putting time into the MSVC target would 
be better invested. Using the MSVC toolchain you have a much 
better tooling, especially debugging and profiling. There are a 
lot of tools which expect you to put out pdb debugging 
information and mingw does not do that. Also personally I don't 
know anyone who uses mingw on windows. Usually mingw is only used 
if some open source project also wants to support windows but has 
no "real" Windows developers. Everyone I know who makes money 
with software development on windows uses Visual Studio and MSVC.

"kinke" <noone nowhere.com> writes:

 I personally think that putting time into the MSVC target would 
 be better invested. Using the MSVC toolchain you have a much 
 better tooling, especially debugging and profiling. There are a 
 lot of tools which expect you to put out pdb debugging 
 information and mingw does not do that. Also personally I don't 
 know anyone who uses mingw on windows. Usually mingw is only 
 used if some open source project also wants to support windows 
 but has no "real" Windows developers. Everyone I know who makes 
 money with software development on windows uses Visual Studio 
 and MSVC.

I fully agree.

I'm also keen on getting LDC to support Win64, but I'm focusing 
entirely on MSVCRT 12+ (VS 2013+). In addition to the advantages 
of the MS toolchain on Windows mentioned by Benjamin, Microsoft 
have also vastly improved their C99 support in their latest 
runtimes so that the C99 MinGW-w64 C-runtime layer is often 
rendered obsolete (e.g., math.h, fenv.h). MSVCRT 14 (VS 2015) 
will improve C99 conformance in stdio.h, another important step.

The DMD guys still need to be motivated (note that LLVM has 
recently dropped support for VS < 2013):
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pulls/kinke

"Johan Engelen" <j j.nl> writes:

OK, thanks for the feedback. I will use MSVC then :)