Info: Emacs build using VC 2005 (VC8) failure

Info: Emacs build using VC 2005 (VC8) failure

[dhruva]

Hi,
 When I try to build GNU Emacs (HEAD) using Visual Studio 2005 (VC8)
on Windows 2003, it fails. This is not one of the most widely used
version of the MS compiler yet, I will explore further and post me
findings. There are some top level changes in the new version of the
compiler. It has safe variants for lot of string handling functions
and throws a whole lot of warnings (DEPRECATED) messages. The main
change is that MS has decided not to ship "libc.lib" and instead
supplies only the "libcmt.lib" (thread safe version). In the GNU Emacs
makefile (on Windows), it hard codes the linking with "libc.lib".
There are further issues which I am in the process of finding (and
probably fixing it too).

with best regards,
dhruva

-- 
Dhruva Krishnamurthy
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Re: Info: Emacs build using VC 2005 (VC8) failure

[Jason Rumney]

dhruva wrote:
> When I try to build GNU Emacs (HEAD) using Visual Studio 2005 (VC8)
> on Windows 2003, it fails.

We looked at this a while ago. The multithreaded versions of the
libraries are missing global variables and some functions that are used
in Emacs. So you cannot just drop them in as replacements for libc.lib

mscvrt.dll was slightly better than libcmt.dll in this respect.

There are some changes required to s/ms-w32.h which I found but didn't
check in, since I failed to get it working completely.

Re: Info: Emacs build using VC 2005 (VC8) failure

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:39:11 +0530
> From: dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com>
> 
>  When I try to build GNU Emacs (HEAD) using Visual Studio 2005 (VC8)
> on Windows 2003, it fails.

This is a known problem.  nt/INSTALL clearly says that VS 2005 is not
supported.  Jason told you some of the reasons.

When this came up during the pretest of Emacs 22.1, we felt that,
given the availability of the MinGW port of GCC, expending to much
effort on adding VC8 support is unjustified.  You are welcome to try
to make it work and submit the resulting patches, of course.

> The main
> change is that MS has decided not to ship "libc.lib" and instead
> supplies only the "libcmt.lib" (thread safe version). In the GNU Emacs
> makefile (on Windows), it hard codes the linking with "libc.lib".

We tried to use libcmt, but the resulting binary crashes because some
conflict with memory allocation functions.

Re: Info: Emacs build using VC 2005 (VC8) failure

[dhruva]

Hi Eli,

On 6/15/07, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> When this came up during the pretest of Emacs 22.1, we felt that,
> given the availability of the MinGW port of GCC, expending to much

I agree. Since MinGW port is mature, as part of GNU, we should also
promote it. I have myself used MinGW for building Emacs and have not
seen any shortcomings (that MS-VS could solve).

> effort on adding VC8 support is unjustified.  You are welcome to try
> to make it work and submit the resulting patches, of course.

I will give it a shot. If the changes are few and easy to incorporate,
might be worth having it in.

> We tried to use libcmt, but the resulting binary crashes because some
> conflict with memory allocation functions.

That is a good pointer, I will try to focus on that.

with best regards,
dhruva

-- 
Dhruva Krishnamurthy
Contents reflect my personal views only!