Re: Yasm r1713 fixed; building and Windows-native

On Dec 20, 2006, at 4:59 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Peter Tanski wrote:
>> On Dec 19, 2006, at 7:50 PM, Neil Mitchell wrote:
>>> No, haven't really looked at others than that. The original Yhc  
>>> reason
>>> for going to Scons was that KDE 4 is going to use it for all
>>> platforms, including Windows. Since then, then dropped Scons and  
>>> moved
>>> to CMake - I am just playing follow the leader :)
>> I am doing essentially the same thing trying to get a Windows  
>> build  together--trying to find a build system that:
>> (1) makes changes easy;
>> (2) encapsulates dependency searches for various operating  
>> systems  and compiler settings for various compilers (gcc, CL); and,
>> (3) manages different build types, including tests.
>> So far, (2) is the main concern for Windows.  My real worry is   
>> Windows Vista: the most recent reports I have seen show that  
>> mingw32  requires a special runtime dll and Administrator  
>> privileges to run  while cygwin is buggy.
>
> I think you mean MSYS, not mingw.  There shoudn't be any difficulty  
> with mingw on Vista, it's just a static library.

Right.  My mistake.  Mingw does require some extra paths and  
sometimes copying some programs into the current directory if the  
builder cannot detect certain file links.  Not too much trouble  
there--of course, from my end this is all hearsay.  I do worry as  
soon as I veer too far away from the MS tools.  When it comes to  
Vista, I'm out: I am using an old 600MHz PIII with Windows XP Pro to  
test this stuff :(

>> The immediate problem GHC has is the CL  compiler--and, probably,  
>> default front-end for the linker, depending  on the link options  
>> required.  Unless someone wants to redo the  current Autotools  
>> build system to use the CL compiler and promptly  discard it for a  
>> Windows-native build, the best thing to do is  convert the build  
>> system to one that will use the CL compiler  automatically.
>
> I don't buy into changing the build system wholesale.  In fact, I  
> suspect the build system hardly has to change at all: we can  
> compile all .c files using GHC, so only GHC has to know how to  
> invoke CL.

I was thinking about a build without bootstrapping; the alternative  
being to test stage1 by successfully building GHC through stage3  
using CL and then bootstrap a new build with GHC-CL.  I'll get on it  
and see what I can accomplish.

Cheers,
Pete