Building Emacs with MSVC

Building Emacs with MSVC

[Christoph]

Does anybody know which version of MSVC successfully built Emacs last?

This blog post 
http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx 
points to MSVC 2003 as a version that apparently worked. According to 
the post and comments in the Emacs makefiles, MSVC 2005 does not work.

I have MSVC 2008 Express Edition installed and I have the trunk to the 
point where it compiles and links, but crashes when dumping Emacs on 
nmake bootstrap. The necessary changes to get to this point included 
various source files, and nmake.defs. I will submit patches for some of 
these.

Anyway, I was wondering what the general status of MSVC support is. 
While working on the make dist target I realized how painful MSVC 
support can be.

Re: Building Emacs with MSVC

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:37:22 -0600
> From: Christoph <cschol2112@googlemail.com>
> 
> Does anybody know which version of MSVC successfully built Emacs last?
> 
> This blog post 
> http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx 
> points to MSVC 2003 as a version that apparently worked. According to 
> the post and comments in the Emacs makefiles, MSVC 2005 does not work.

Yes, Studio 2003 is the last version known to build a working binary.

> I have MSVC 2008 Express Edition installed and I have the trunk to the 
> point where it compiles and links, but crashes when dumping Emacs on 
> nmake bootstrap.

That's a known problem.  I forget the details (you can find them in
the archives), but there's some problem with the library functions
supplied by later versions of Studio, and/or conflicts with our
customized malloc, that cause the crash.

> The necessary changes to get to this point included 
> various source files, and nmake.defs. I will submit patches for some of 
> these.

What for?  If we cannot build a working binary, why pollute the
sources with more MSVC-specific patches?

> Anyway, I was wondering what the general status of MSVC support is. 
> While working on the make dist target I realized how painful MSVC 
> support can be.

Right.  And since MinGW is available and in pretty good shape, we
decided at the time not to invest any effort in MSVC.

Re: Building Emacs with MSVC

[Christoph]

On 4/6/2010 9:13 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Yes, Studio 2003 is the last version known to build a working binary.
>    
OK.

> That's a known problem.  I forget the details (you can find them in
> the archives), but there's some problem with the library functions
> supplied by later versions of Studio, and/or conflicts with our
> customized malloc, that cause the crash.
>    
Yes, one issue is the library libc.lib (single threaded) which was 
replaced by libcmt.lib (multithreaded). But there were other issues like 
shadowing functions, for example sys_ctime and utime.

Also, maybe this is interesting for you Eli: bidi.c failed because MSVC 
does not support the inline keyword for C files (only for C++ files). 
__inline is the correct keyword for C files 
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z8y1yy88.aspx) in MSVC.

It might not matter, since GCC compiles fine, but I though I'd mention 
it anyway.

> What for?  If we cannot build a working binary, why pollute the
> sources with more MSVC-specific patches?
>    
The patch is actually for a bug in the existing MSVC makefile in 
lib-src. I am pretty sure even older versions would not run with this, 
since nmake fails right away:

=== modified file 'lib-src/makefile.w32-in'
--- lib-src/makefile.w32-in    2010-04-03 01:54:24 +0000
+++ lib-src/makefile.w32-in    2010-04-06 03:06:03 +0000
@@ -195,8 +195,8 @@
      $(lispsource)term/pc-win.elc \
      $(lispsource)x-dnd.elc \
      $(lispsource)term/x-win.elc \
-    ${lispsource}emacs-lisp/easymenu.elc \
-    ${lispsource}term/ns-win.elc
+    $(lispsource)emacs-lisp/easymenu.elc \
+    $(lispsource)term/ns-win.elc

> Right.  And since MinGW is available and in pretty good shape, we
> decided at the time not to invest any effort in MSVC.
>    
I agree. MinGW works absolutely fine, so is there even any reason to 
keep the MSVC stuff around? Was MSVC supported earlier than MinGW? I 
surely don't want to start another discussion about backwards 
compatibility and supporting older versions but a lot areas could be 
cleaned up quite a bit if MSVC/nmake support was dropped in favor of 
MinGW/gmake. The only reason for the zipdist batch file was nmake, which 
turns out to be horribly limited compared to gmake.

Just my $0.02,
Christoph

Re: Building Emacs with MSVC

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:49:27 -0600
> From: Christoph <cschol2112@googlemail.com>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Also, maybe this is interesting for you Eli: bidi.c failed because MSVC 
> does not support the inline keyword for C files (only for C++ files). 
> __inline is the correct keyword for C files 
> (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z8y1yy88.aspx) in MSVC.

Right, I will look into this.  Maybe I can just remove that attribute,
since the reordering engine is fast enough even in a non-optimized
build, and GCC will inline static functions anyway.  Thanks for
pointing this out.

> The patch is actually for a bug in the existing MSVC makefile in 
> lib-src. I am pretty sure even older versions would not run with this, 
> since nmake fails right away:
> 
> === modified file 'lib-src/makefile.w32-in'
> --- lib-src/makefile.w32-in    2010-04-03 01:54:24 +0000
> +++ lib-src/makefile.w32-in    2010-04-06 03:06:03 +0000
> @@ -195,8 +195,8 @@
>       $(lispsource)term/pc-win.elc \
>       $(lispsource)x-dnd.elc \
>       $(lispsource)term/x-win.elc \
> -    ${lispsource}emacs-lisp/easymenu.elc \
> -    ${lispsource}term/ns-win.elc
> +    $(lispsource)emacs-lisp/easymenu.elc \
> +    $(lispsource)term/ns-win.elc

Yes, braces are a no-no in Windows makefiles.  In any case, we do
still try to support Nmake, even though newer MSVC is not supported.

> > Right.  And since MinGW is available and in pretty good shape, we
> > decided at the time not to invest any effort in MSVC.
> >    
> I agree. MinGW works absolutely fine, so is there even any reason to 
> keep the MSVC stuff around?

Probably not.

> Was MSVC supported earlier than MinGW? I 

Yes.

Re: Building Emacs with MSVC

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:49:27 -0600
> From: Christoph <cschol2112@googlemail.com>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Also, maybe this is interesting for you Eli: bidi.c failed because MSVC 
> does not support the inline keyword for C files (only for C++ files). 
> __inline is the correct keyword for C files 
> (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z8y1yy88.aspx) in MSVC.
> 
> It might not matter, since GCC compiles fine, but I though I'd mention 
> it anyway.

I fixed this by using `INLINE' rather than `inline', as we do
elsewhere in Emacs sources.

Thanks for pointing this out.