clwrapper

clwrapper is a simple cc.exe which calls into the compiler that ships with Visual Studio. The aim is to make it easier to share Makefiles between Unix and Windows.

Rationale

The Microsoft C/C++ compiler is tedious to invoke.

There are a few options, none of them good:

1. Create and maintain project and solution files, then either: a. Build from the VS IDE b. Invoke MSBuild from the command line

2. Run a specialized command prompt (?!) and invoke cl.exe, which has command line option syntax that is inconsistent with other mainstream compilers.

3. Use Cygwin or MinGW, which is not the most "native-feeling" compiler on Windows.

Therefore, this project: Invoke the MS compiler, but give it a familiar Unix-like command line interface. No need to come up with "project files" and "solution files". No need to use a specialized Start Menu shortcut to invoke it from a specialized command prompt. Just use cc, mostly the same way you would at a Unix machine.

Building

Type nmake from the Visual Studio Command Prompt (Accessible from Start).

Note that cc.exe, the resulting binary, will not need to be run from the special VS command prompt; it will search for the VS binaries and Windows SDK on its own.

Options

cc will accept:

-V major.minor

  By default, `clwrapper` will search for installed Visual Studios
  in the registry and pick the highest one.  This value picks a
  specific version.  I have variously seen this work with `9.0` (2008),
  `10.0` (2010), `11.0` (2012), `14.0` (2015).

-sdkversion major.minor

  Version of the Windows SDK to use.
  By default, `clwrapper` will try the highest version it finds.

-m32 -mamd64 -mwoa

  Build for x86, amd64, or NT on ARM, respectively.
  Some of these will vary based on which compilers you've installed
  or what version of Visual Studio is being used.

-static-crt

  Link CRT statically.  This wrapper will always use multi-threaded
  CRT, keeping with modern assumptions that threads are a fact of life.

-O[0-9s] -Wall -Werror -o -c -DMACRO[=value] -Iincdir -Llibdir -llib -shared

  Semantics for the above similar to `gcc`.

clwrapper-lib.exe

clwrapper-lib is a small hack to use this project's "Visual Studio-seeking" code to find lib.exe and create static libraries. It supports the following from cc.exe:

-V major.minor -sdkversion major.minor -m*

Other options are assumed to be passed directly to lib.exe.

Bugs and what's missing

• A bunch of PE file specific options are missing. For example MinGW can specify DllMain with -Wl,-e,EntryPoint.

• Would be wise to have a pass-through to give additional options directly to cl. Sometimes this actually works by accident, but an "official" hook might be beter.

• Windows software is completely confused about command line passing, escaping, and where the boundaries of argv lie. I haven't given any special thought to this problem. Cases like -DFoo="long expression" probably don't work.