Re: Preprocessor defines in MS-Windows build

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>  _X86_               -- not needed, defined automatically by MinGW
>                         headers
>  i386                -- not needed
>   

They may not be needed for a mingw build, but do the msvc headers also 
define them?

>  HAVE_NTGUI          -- can be replaced with WINDOWSNT, since the W32
>                         build doesn't use any other GUI
>   

This is there so that theoretically users can build a smaller text only 
Emacs. I have never heard of anyone doing so in the last ten years, and 
would not be surprised if such a build fails, especially since the 
multi-tty and unicode merges, so it may not be important. Perhaps it 
should be added to the list of variables appended to src/config.h by 
configure.bat to make it easier to test the text-only build.

>  USE_CRT_DLL         -- looks like it's unneeded, since we never use
>                         anything but the CRTDLL.dll runtime
>   

I think there was at least an experimental attempt many years ago to use 
MSVCRT.dll with the msvc compiler, and if we are ever to get more recent 
versions of msvc working again it will be necessary to keep this around.