turol / msvgcc

The glorious and horrible Visual-C-on-Linux hack

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msvgcc, The glorious and horrible Visual-C-on-Linux hack


WHY

I have multi-platform code which compiles on Linux and Mingw. Mingw unfortunately didn't support (maybe still doesn't) C++ libraries compiled with Microsoft compiler. I also wanted to test my code on other compilers because this usually exposes latent bugs.

Microsoft has a free version of Visual C but unfortunately
1) it's Windows-only and I hate leaving Linux for a toy OS, especially since my home computers don't even have Windows
2) their IDE, like so many others, is absolutely horrible
3) their compiler can't be used with standard Makefiles because of their nonstandard command-line syntax

Problem 1 can be fixed with wine and if 3 could be fixed then 2 wouldn't be a problem any more. So what to do? After trying to hack a Makefile to pass msvc -style options and making a big mess I decided to create a small wrapper which would parse standard command line options and convert them to nonstandard msvc options.

The result is msvgcc. It's a small and ugly program which can be used like gcc. It takes command line options, does some minimal checking on them and then invokes cl.exe. It also optionally generated make-compatible dependency files. Actually I'm not sure about that optionally thing since I use automatic dependency generation on all my projects. It might try to do this always.

So now you can create Windows binaries with Microsoft compiler from Linux using GNU make. The most amazing thing about it is that it works at all.

This code is in the Public Domain and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. If it breaks you get to keep all the pieces.



INSTALLATION

This is not for the faint of heart. Don't try unless you're pretty familiar with Linux and Wine.

You need Linux and relatively recent Wine. Then you need to install Visual C. I have used 2005 Express Edition. 2008 and 2010 didn't work last time I tried. For instructions and updated info check Wine Appdb.

You need to set up Wine PATH variable to include some Visual C directories. I forget exactly how and which. It should be somewhere on Wine Appdb/mailing lists.

Make does not like when there are paths with names. There are some hardcoded paths in the source. You need to create some symlinks or change those paths.

Then install necessary SDKs you might need. Platform SDK and Direct3D SDK are pretty usefull.

The program is written in Haskell and tested using GHC. 6.12 and 7.0 are known to work.



USAGE

If you have runhaskell you can simply set the executable bit on msvgcc.lhs. It should just work however there's a bug (feature?) in GHCi which pollutes your /tmp directory with lots of empty directories. To avoid this compile into a native executable.

Then just change your Makefile and replace gcc or g++ with msvgcc.

Unrecognized options are passed to cl/link as-is.

If you want to really show off you can add msvgcc.lhs to your source tree and use make order-only dependencies to automatically compile it when it changes. You shouldn't use normal dependencies because you don't actually want to recompile all your source files when msvgcc changes.



BUGS

Header file handling for dependency generation is pretty simple. If you're not very careful it gives spurious errors and doesn't report them very well.



Not My BUGS:

Visual C 2008 and 2010 don't work on current Wine. Wine issue.

New-style debugging information (/Zi) does not work, use old-style (/Z7) instead. Might fixed in new Wine (http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19781) but I have not tested this.

On some versions of Wine using optimization or compiling too complex files crashes the compiler. Might have something to do with memory use and might be fixed with latest Wine. I tested Wine 1.3.18 but not extensively.



TODO:
The program does what I need it to do so I don't intend TO DO these. Someone else might.

Write better documentation. Especially document what command-line options are parsed/changed and how.

Add support for LTO. When -flto is given on the command line, add options /Og /GL to compiler/linker. Not sure if both flags are needed for both programs or not.

Does not support ccache. Would require some hacks with the preprocessor.

Replace dependency generation with something sane.

Probably does not support distcc. Does Wine require a working X display?

The code is pretty ugly. Beautify it.

There are hardcoded paths. Get rid of them.

This could be extended to other compilers and linkers.
Example of another compiler would be Intel. I'm not sure if it requires this or not since I have never used it.
Example of another linker would be crinkler. It's a specialized linker for creating very tiny executables.

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The glorious and horrible Visual-C-on-Linux hack


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