[LLVMdev] VS build is broken again

[Chris Lattner]

On May 17, 2008, at 2:44 PM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
> I don't know how much LLVM build system is tied to the GNU toolchain  
> or
> how much it depends on *nix features, but suppossing that adding  
> support
> for MSVC++ is impractical, perhaps it would be simpler to implement a
> Makefile-based build system for MSVC++ than to keep up to date the
> project files. This would support features like the one Anton mentions
> on the other response to you, thus lessening the maintenance work. A
> really nice thing is that, in principle, a makefile-based build system
> would work the same for VS 2003, 2005 and 2008.

Frankly, the LLVM build machinery could use a good scrubbing.  Also,  
maintenance of parallel project files really sucks, if we have to  
continue doing this, life for non-unix people will continue to be an  
unhappy one.

Others have suggested alternative build systems before like cmake.   
Apparently cmake can autogenerate VC++ and Xcode project files from  
the same thing that it builds from on unix systems.  Has anyone used  
cmake in a real system before?  Are there other worthwhile  
alternatives?  To me, I think it would be interesting to switch over  
llvm and clang (probably start with clang since it is very small) and  
do other things later (e.g. llvm-test may never change off gmake,  
gmake is too useful there).

-Chris