building on Windows

[justinmk]

[ Continuing discussion from issue #287 ]

I can build libuv on MSVC 2013, but not mingw. It seems that libuv only supports building on MSVC, not mingw, and definitely not cygwin: joyent/libuv#845

Using msys2 which bundles the latest mingw-w64:

$ make -f Makefile.mingw
cc -Wall -Wextra -Wno-unused-parameter -Iinclude -Isrc -Isrc/win -DWIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN -D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0600 -c -o src/fs-poll.o src/fs-poll.c
In file included from include/uv.h:61:0,
                 from src/fs-poll.c:22:
include/uv-unix.h:145:1: error: unknown type name ‘pthread_barrier_t’
 typedef pthread_barrier_t uv_barrier_t;
 ^
Makefile.mingw:82: recipe for target 'src/fs-poll.o' failed
make: *** [src/fs-poll.o] Error 1

Similar issue was reported to libuv 8 months ago. In practice, libuv only supports MSVC.

[jszakmeister]

Good to know. I'd like to make the build system capable of using MSVC--though I don't really run Windows myself. But having done development in MSYS and cygwin, it much better to be as native as possible. It makes integration with other things under Windows that much easier.

[equalsraf]

I gave it a whirl last night using MSVC 2012. Here is a quick progress report, I'm not on windows right now, but I will push some patches when I get the chance.

• libUV built without issues (static)
• There is a check for pthreads in CMakeLists.txt:31, should it be removed? I was under the impression we would rely on the uv API
• FindLibUV.cmake was unable to find libuv without modifications - set(_uv_names uv libuv) - after that it worked ok
• CMake was able to find the GNUWin32 curses libraries
• I was able to start building with nmake, but it failed because MSVC 2012 does not have stdbool.h

I'll give it another shot later, either with MSVC 2013, or by defining bool/true/false by hand. In any case if c99 is what we assume for neovim (#161) then MSVC 2013 is the way to go.

[equalsraf]

Tested with MSVC 2013, the stdbool.h error is now gone and I'm starting to get into errors related with UNIX types (timeval, uid_t, mode_t) and since most defines are currently hardcoded in config.h.in I don't think we can proceed without porting some functions to use libuv.

On a positive note

• some problems (struct timeval) can be solved simply by including uv.h (i.e. libuv finds and includes the right headers)
• libuv also includes some abstract types (uv_uid_t instead of uid_t)

[felipecrv]

@mahkoh once said we're only supporting MSVC > 2013
On Mar 21, 2014 6:19 AM, "Rui Abreu Ferreira" notifications@github.com
wrote:

I gave it a whirl last night using MSVC 2012. Here is a quick progress
report, I'm not on windows right now, but I will push some patches when I
get the chance.

• libUV built without issues (static)
• There is a check for pthreads in CMakeLists.txt:31, should it be
  removed? I was under the impression we would rely on the uv API
• FindLibUV.cmake was unable to find libuv without modifications -
  set(_uv_names uv libuv) - after that it worked ok
• CMake was able to find the GNUWin32 curses libraries
• I was able to start building with nmake, but it failed because MSVC
  2012 does not have stdbool.h

I'll give it another shot later, either with MSVC 2013, or by defining
bool/true/false by hand. In any case if c99 is what we assume for neovim (
#161 #161) then MSVC 2013 is the
way to go.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/328#issuecomment-38259367
.

[tarruda]

We can focus on building for mingw later. Closing for now

[justinmk]

@tarruda this issue was also for MSVC.

[tarruda]

@justinmk even so, we should focus on building for windows only after libuv/new GUI. Right now there are probably many things that just won't work on windows, one for sure is the mch_call_shell function which is used everywhere for executing commands.(Though that is being fixed by #444)