Re: ANN: GNUstep Windows MSVC Toolchain Scripts

On 20 Mar 2021, at 10:49, Frederik Seiffert <[email protected]> wrote:
>> If you look at the build for libobjc2 on Windows, because we're using a CMake version that predates official support for either Objective-C or using the gcc-compatible driver, we have the same problem with /TP being added.  We work around this with an undocumented feature of clang where you can provide an environment variable that removes flags from the command line.  You can probably set that in your Visual Studio build. Setting this strips the TC and TP flags from clang invocations:
>> 
>> CCC_OVERRIDE_OPTIONS=x-TC x-TP x/TC x/TP
> 
> Good idea using CCC_OVERRIDE_OPTIONS, that should probably work fine. Ultimately I’m hoping that we can come up with something more integrated like a custom build tool spec in VS, so .m and .mm files automatically get all the right flags.

It’s definitely not the *right* solution, but it should work for now.  VS Code now has really good CMake support and I think it’s reasonable in VS as well.  I’d love to see GNUstep adopt CMake - with the last release, it officially supports Objective-C and using clang with the gcc-like driver on Windows, so it would give us the ability to generate XCode projects, Visual Studio projects, and something that VS Code supports natively.

>> It would be great at some point to remove the pthread-w32 dependency. SRWLocks and ConditionVariables on Windows seem to provide everything we need for NSLock* and be a fairly small amount of code.
> 
> Yeah absolutely, I just wanted to make sure we could actually get this working before spending time on improvements. I also expect to spend a lot of time on fixes while integrating the toolchain in our project.

The SRWLock APIs were introduced with Windows 7, as I recall.  Last time I looked at this, there were enough XP machines that folks cared about that it didn’t make sense to use them, but now Windows 7 is effectively out of support so is a reasonable baseline.

David