[LLVMdev] Final Visual Studio Patches

[Vikram S. Adve]

On Nov 2, 2004, at 8:38 AM, Reid Spencer wrote:

> Morten Ofstad wrote:
>>  Well, actually I'm speaking mostly for myself ;-) I have a front 
>> end, I want to generate code, all I really need is a llvm.lib and the 
>> include files that go along with it... I imagine this is quite a 
>> common scenario, but I might be wrong.
>
> This is pretty much my usage scenario too, however I expect to be 
> *able* to hack on the source and consequently rebuild it if I need 
> too.  Furthermore, a large part of the usage of LLVM is currently in 
> research where modifications are much more likely.
>
> It sounds like there are two primary usage models, however:
>
> 1. I-just-need-a-backend-to-generate-code case:
>    Here a simple binary distribution (tools, libraries, headers) would 
> be
>    sufficient.
>
> 2. I-need-to-hack-a-compiler-for-my-work/research case:
>    Here the user needs full build control over everything (we can't 
> pre-suppose
>    which part of LLVM they want to hack on).
>
> So, I think what we want is a full build environment anyway to satisfy 
> case 2 and generate the binary distribution for case 1.  Ideally what 
> we want is a build system that can produce an msi installer on 
> windows, rpms on RH, Solaris pkg on Sun, StuffIt on Mac (or whatever 
> they use these days).  However, tgz or zip is probably sufficient for 
> binary distributions for a while.
>
> My point here is that we have 98% of what we need for *all* Unix 
> platforms, the only missing link is Windows. So, why should we 
> bastardize both worlds? Attempting windows conformance in the 
> makefiles will make the Unix world unhappy. Attempting to unixify a 
> windows build environment would make the windows world unhappy.  My 
> vote is to just have both an MSVS project file and other supporting 
> files added to a directory named "win" at the top level and let the 
> windows folks keep it up to date. That way everyone is happy :)
>
> Reid.

All of this makes sense to me.

--Vikram
http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~vadve
http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/