GitHub Action

[anzz1]

Is there a GitHub Action for the CI to use w64devkit for MinGW builds?
I was thinking of making one myself but thought I should check whether one already exists.

[Peter0x44]

No, the current actions are only for building w64devkit. Perhaps it would be nice to offer a linux toolchain configured like w64devkit somehow (llvm-mingw does this). But we don't have anything like that now.

I suggest you just install the mingw-w64 package of your distro in github actions and use that. if you put -static in your C(XX)FLAGS it will static link libgcc and libstdc++ so the resulting executable doesn't depend on any dlls. w64devkit never has this problem because it has no libgcc and libstdc++ dlls to begin with.

[anzz1]

Yeah there is the setup-mingw action (that apparently works for both linux and windows hosts) but was thinking of w64devkit since it nicely has everything in one package with zero configuration and it "just works".

GitHub has Windows runners too so it doesn't necessarily need to support a Linux host. I was thinking of a simple action that downloads and extracts w64devkit from the releases and then uses that to build a project.

[Peter0x44]

The windows runners cost more (doesn't matter for opensource proj since you don't pay) and also run builds slower.

I wouldn't use them unless required (e.g. running a testsuite for windows)

[anzz1]

Interesting, I did not know that.

[anzz1]

If your application has tests that you're running on windows and spinning up a windows runner anyway, might as well run the build on it too. I admit though that I've no idea about the costs whether its still cheaper to build on linux, make an artifact, extract it on windows and run the tests, versus building and testing in windows.

I wish they had windows 7 runners as those would be light on resources and could be spun up almost as fast as linux runners. Modern windows is quite bloated indeed and takes long time to spin up a VM. But alas, Windows 7 is EOL which puts it in the graveyard even though its perfectly cromulent OS for many kinds of uses even today, especially for things like VMs as W7 uses several multiples less resources than W10/W11 while still being able to do almost everything that the new versions do.

[skeeto]

For obvious reasons I prefer w64dk's toolchain to the Mingw-w64 toolchains in Linux distributions, and so I do feel that gap using GitHub Actions to build Windows binaries. The Linux runners work so much better. Tempts me to try running w64dk on Wine.

[Peter0x44]

w64devkit works totally fine under wine, I've tried that before. But I still don't think that's suitable for GitHub actions. Really, all it needs is a toolchain configured in the same manner as w64devkit, but for a Linux host instead.

[anzz1]

Check https://github.com/anzz1/setup-w64devkit
Requires use of Windows runner though