[LLVMdev] Build LLVM as a DLL on Windows x86

[Alan Garny]

For what is worth, I have been able to trace my problem (thanks Kevin Kelley
for the indirect help!). The 'culprit' was DLL Expert Viewer
(http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/dll_export_viewer.html). It kept reporting
that there were no exported functions, so I (wrongly) assumed that something
had gone wrong while, using PEInfo
(http://www.pazera-software.com/products/peinfo/) I could see that
everything was, in fact, correct. I have just tested things in my
application and now everything works as expected and as on Linux and Mac OS
X.

Alan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu]
> On Behalf Of Alan Garny
> Sent: 14 November 2011 16:07
> To: 'Óscar Fuentes'
> Cc: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] Build LLVM as a DLL on Windows x86
> 
> > >> GNU make is essential to msys build. I guess msysdtk would have it.
> > >
> > > I could find a copy of msysDTK at
> > >
> >
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Other/Unsupported/MSYS/msy
> > > sDTK/, but not only is the 'latest' version a very old version
> > > (2003!), but once installed I couldn't find a copy of gmake in it.
> >
> > msysDTK is *not* required (nor useful) for building LLVM. Plain MSYS
> > used to include a `make' command.
> 
> Indeed...
> 
> > > I wish the documentation on how to build a shared version of LLVM on
> > > Windows was up-to-date (e.g. the need for Python is not mentioned)
> > > and links to where to get prerequisites mentioned. I would be happy
> > > to help with this, but I would first need to be able to build LLVM...
> > > Otherwise, it would be nice, too, to have CMake to fully work with
> > > LLVM... :)
> >
> > The CMake build should work on Windows, with either VS or MinGW.
> LLVM
> > DLL's on Windows are not supported by the CMake build because the
> LLVM
> > source code lacks the symbol export directives, not because the CMake
> > build is missing anything.
> 
> There is at least that. I mean, there isn't the usual
__declspec(dllimport) /
> __declspec(dllexport), but I believe I did come across (at least) another
issue
> when I first tried to do a CMake build.
> 
> > The autoconf build exploits a feature of MinGW's binutils that
> > auto-exports all symbols, like in Linux. It is a bit fragile. Building
> > the big DLL would be also possible with the CMake build using the same
> > technique, but AFAIR nobody cared too much.
> 
> That's too bad, I would have thought that it would have been useful to
quite
> a few people...? Personally, I have already spent a lot of time trying to
get a
> DLL for LLVM (too much time when I consider how quickly and easily I was
> able to get a shared library for LLVM on Linux and Mac OS X), but I find
it
> difficult to tell what is wrong with my build environment.
> 
> Wouldn't it be possible for the LLVM team to release a shared library for
> LLVM? After all, there are already LLVM binaries for Mingw32/x86...
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
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