[LLVMdev] Files to lib/System/Win32

[Jeff Cohen]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:50:43 -0500 (CDT)
Chris Lattner <sabre at nondot.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Reid Spencer wrote:
> 
> > These are all reasons why the Win32 port doesn't exist today. LLVM is
> 
> Well, the reason it doesn't exist today is that noone has worked on it.
> :)
> 
> > heavily influenced and implemented by Unix tools/concepts/facilities.
> > Since building on Win32 will also be a problem, I think that we should
> > just target cygwin as our Win32 solution for now and get that to work
> > really well. I know cygwin is a slow pig, but at least we can get LLVM
> > to work with it. We also have Interix which is another interesting
> > approach. However, I don't think Interix has the tool support that we
> > need to build LLVM, its just a Unix interface for windows machines,
> > isn't it?
> 
> I sorta agree, but not entirely.  In particular, I think that it's
> reasonable for LLVM as a whole to require cygwin.  However, I think that
> it would be great (and doable) to be able build the LLVM tools WITHOUT
> linking to the cygwin DLL or using any of the emulation code.  This should
> provide fast executables without having to change all of our support
> makefiles and other stuff.

There's a legal reason to avoid cygwin...  Unless you cough up money,
it's GPL--and not LGPL.

> 
> > I agree that if/when the time comes to support Win32 natively, it will
> > be a big job involving configuration, new makefiles and project files,
> > and all the other Visual studio shebang.  I'm personally not up to that
> > task as my Win32 skills are ancient and I have no interest in updating
> > them.
> 
> I really am not sure whether it would make sense to do the full VS project
> thing.  In particular, it would be hard to maintain.  Porting lib/System
> to use native win32 sounds like an excellent idea though, and IS quite
> useful.

Well... it wouldn't be the end of the world to use GNU make.  /Some/ GNU
software would be required, bison if nothing else.  Still would need a
Windows-specific set of makefiles.  They could be based on the makefiles
generated by configure.

> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> -Chris

Yes, I did just have another thought :)  The Win32 port would be
pointless unless it can produce Windows executables, especially GUI
apps.  LLVM would have to be able to handle Windows.h and friends, and
some way of converting the assembly files produced by llc into binaries.
Ideally, without using GNU as or ld. 

> -- 
> http://llvm.org/
> http://nondot.org/sabre/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
> http://mail.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev