[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] Should we stop supporting building with Visual Studio?

Wed Oct 10 13:51:52 PDT 2018

I don't personally use the Xcode generator, but I know lots of people who do. The Xcode generator can generate a working Xcode project with an accurate clang index. One of the challenges to get that working though is that the project actually has to be able to build at least through intrinsics_gen, otherwise there are headers missing and the indexing falls over. I assume Visual Studio's intellisense also requires building through header generation for its indexing to work correctly.

Similar to MSBuild, Xcodebuild is *way* slower at building LLVM than ninja, so I think many Xcode users are already using a workflow similar to what Zachary described in his initial email, but I know people also run the test targets from Xcode.

Since the benefit of dropping support for building/testing with Visual studio would basically be moot without also dropping support for building/testing with Xcode I'm really not in favor of this.

I do think that the VS native CMake integration is promising, but it has a long way to come before it will really replace the native project generator. I've been using it when I use Windows (which admittedly isn't very often), and have found it to build well, but the UI is unwieldy, and it has problems with the number of build targets that LLVM's ninja build produces.

-Chris

> On Oct 10, 2018, at 9:40 AM, Danila Malyutin via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> Have anyone had any experience with VS native CMake integration? You don’t need to employ all the described hacks when you can just trigger Ninja build from VS itself. I’ve used CMake + Ninja from VS on a couple smaller projects without any problems. It was very smooth. But it might not be the case for something as big and complicated as LLVM. I remember trying to use CMake project about a year ago but in the end I’ve decided to stick with .sln . I don’t recall whether there were some show stopping bugs, if it was generally worse experience or something else. Also, the situation has probably changed for the better since then. If not, perhaps that’s something LLVM could improve from its side.
>  
> From: llvm-dev [mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org] On Behalf Of Nicolas Capens via llvm-dev
> Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2018 17:16
> To: zturner at google.com
> Cc: llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org; cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org; lldb-dev at lists.llvm.org
> Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] Should we stop supporting building with Visual Studio?
>  
> Hi Zachary,
>  
> We use LLVM JIT in SwiftShader, which is used by Google Chrome and Android (Emulator). Most development takes place in Visual Studio, where it builds as part of the rest of the SwiftShader solution. So we care about LLVM source files compiling successfully within Visual Studio.
>  
> Would it be reasonable to at least ensure that major releases (7.0, 8.0, etc.) build with Visual Studio? We don't care much about breakages in between releases, and the other issues you listed don't affect us much either due to using custom solution/project files.
>  
> Thanks for your consideration,
> Nicolas Capens
>  
> On Sun, Oct 7, 2018 at 4:51 PM Zachary Turner via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org <mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
> This has been on my mind for quite some time, but recently it's been popping up more and more seeing some of the issues people have run into.
>  
> Before people get the wrong idea, let me make one thing clear.  **I am not proposing we stop supporting the CMake Visual Studio generator.  I am only proposing we stop supporting actually compiling with the generated project**.  Yes the distinction is important, and I'll elaborate more on why later.  First though, here are some of the issues with the VS generator:
>  
> 1) Using MSBuild is slower than Ninja.
> 2) Unless you remember to pass -Thost=x64 on the command line, you won't be able to successfully build.  We can (and have) updated the documentation to indicate this, but it's not intuitive and still bites people because for some reason this is not the default.
> 3) Even if you do pass -Thost=x64 to CMake, it will apparently still fail sometimes.  See this thread for details: http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2018-October/059609.html <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__lists.llvm.org_pipermail_cfe-2Ddev_2018-2DOctober_059609.html&d=DwMFaQ&c=DPL6_X_6JkXFx7AXWqB0tg&r=YgdxWMcdqQPlU9EdetI-xI79G7ouw9_Us0dFsZnFQYU&m=vPuaNrzhkslLUCf7x4H7aU8nS2ikPK2qjbgroDOP-nM&s=St9hLhS5w07cXg4vWEp_FdukmJgBC7EFgvJWUBC--6s&e=>.  It seems the parallel build scheduler does not do a good job and can bring a machine down.  This is not the first time though, every couple of months there's a thread about how building or running tests from within VS doesn't work.
> 4) Supporting it is a continuous source of errors and mistakes when writing tests.  The VS generator outputs a project which can build Debug / Release with a single project.  This means that `CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug` is a no-op on this generator.  The reason this matters for the test suite is because `${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}` isn't sufficient to identify the location of the binaries.  You need `${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/${CMAKE_CFG_INTDIR}` instead.
>  
> There is a continuous source of problems in our CMake [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].  It also affects tests, and every time someone adds a new lit site configuration, they have to remember to add this magic block of code:
>  
> # Support substitution of the tools_dir with user parameters. This is
> # used when we can't determine the tool dir at configuration time.
> try:
>     config.llvm_tools_dir = config.llvm_tools_dir % lit_config.params
>     config.llvm_shlib_dir = config.llvm_shlib_dir % lit_config.params
> except KeyError:
>     e = sys.exc_info()[1]
>     key, = e.args
>     lit_config.fatal("unable to find %r parameter, use '--param=%s=VALUE'" % (key,key))
>  
> to the file (even though only about 2 people actually understand what this does), which has caused problems several times.
>  
> 5) VSCode and Visual Studio both support opening CMake projects directly now, which bypasses MSBuild.  I don't know how well Visual Studio supports LLVM's CMake, but the last time I tried it with VSCode on Linux it worked fine.
>  
> ----
>  
> I mentioned earlier that the distinction between not *building* with a VS-generated project and not supporting the VS generator is important.
>  
> I don't want to speak for everyone, but I believe that *most* people use the VS generator because they want IDE support for their projects.  They want to be able to browse code, hit F5 to debug, F9 to set breakpoints, etc.  They don't necessarily care that Ctrl+Shift+B is how the code is generated versus some other incantation.  I'm asserting that it's possible to still have all the things people actually want from the VS generator without actually building from inside of VS.  In fact, I've been doing this for several years.  The workflow is:
>  
> 1) Run CMake twice, generating to separate output directories.  Once using -G "Visual Studio 15 2017" and once using -G Ninja, each to different directories.
>  
> 2) Open the VS one.  You have full IDE support.
>  
> 3) Instead of hitting Ctrl+Shift+B to build, have a command prompt window open and type ninja.  Wait for it to complete.  If you want to you can make a custom tool command in Visual Studio so that you can access this from a keyboard shortcut.
>  
> 4) When you want to debug, set your startup project (as you normally would), right click and hit properties, go to Debugging, change Command from $(TargetPath) to <type the full path to bin/foo.exe of the program you want to debug>.
>  
> 5) Hit F5.
>  
> In short, with only 2 simple additional steps (run CMake an extra time, and type a path into a window), people can have the exact workflow they are used to, plus faster builds, minus all of the problems and complexities associated with building from within VS.
>  
> And we can simplify our CMake logic and lit configuration files as well.
>  
> ----
>  
> 
> [1] - https://reviews.llvm.org/D43096 <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__reviews.llvm.org_D43096&d=DwMFaQ&c=DPL6_X_6JkXFx7AXWqB0tg&r=YgdxWMcdqQPlU9EdetI-xI79G7ouw9_Us0dFsZnFQYU&m=vPuaNrzhkslLUCf7x4H7aU8nS2ikPK2qjbgroDOP-nM&s=K1WR3WJM8sVBja_2q4oATeYsvnE6evI9AaWOjRsffXA&e=>
> [2] - https://reviews.llvm.org/D46642 <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__reviews.llvm.org_D46642&d=DwMFaQ&c=DPL6_X_6JkXFx7AXWqB0tg&r=YgdxWMcdqQPlU9EdetI-xI79G7ouw9_Us0dFsZnFQYU&m=vPuaNrzhkslLUCf7x4H7aU8nS2ikPK2qjbgroDOP-nM&s=WhN9-3TMktr71sGvBAhjYubw3IFFA5Iqn-mebFxOR-g&e=>
> [3] - https://reviews.llvm.org/D45918 <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__reviews.llvm.org_D45918&d=DwMFaQ&c=DPL6_X_6JkXFx7AXWqB0tg&r=YgdxWMcdqQPlU9EdetI-xI79G7ouw9_Us0dFsZnFQYU&m=vPuaNrzhkslLUCf7x4H7aU8nS2ikPK2qjbgroDOP-nM&s=l-zWEIFIEf5gYqfknJ4q072C7eTSr3MzXzkBeVbUlIg&e=>
> [4] - https://reviews.llvm.org/D45333 <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__reviews.llvm.org_D45333&d=DwMFaQ&c=DPL6_X_6JkXFx7AXWqB0tg&r=YgdxWMcdqQPlU9EdetI-xI79G7ouw9_Us0dFsZnFQYU&m=vPuaNrzhkslLUCf7x4H7aU8nS2ikPK2qjbgroDOP-nM&s=vMYozkIGbTXknMzPd-OyGwbO4CO5sZ4uKvDfoRONdkQ&e=>
> [5] - https://reviews.llvm.org/D46334 <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__reviews.llvm.org_D46334&d=DwMFaQ&c=DPL6_X_6JkXFx7AXWqB0tg&r=YgdxWMcdqQPlU9EdetI-xI79G7ouw9_Us0dFsZnFQYU&m=vPuaNrzhkslLUCf7x4H7aU8nS2ikPK2qjbgroDOP-nM&s=gM1McgMb8P97yKAR2x_0wBZHDDwoEH2FeA0LsKaCBRw&e=>
>  
>  
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