[GNC-dev] Building on Windows

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 27, 2019, at 1:29 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Op maandag 26 augustus 2019 18:32:40 CEST schreef John Ralls:
>>> On Aug 26, 2019, at 1:49 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
>>> wrote:> 
>>> Op zaterdag 24 augustus 2019 19:40:06 CEST schreef Matthew Forbis:
>>>> I was running gnucash directly from the inst directory and not creating
>>>> an
>>>> installer first.  This explanation makes sense.
>>> 
>>> There you go.
>>> 
>>> It would be nice though to be able to run directly from the inst directory
>>> while debugging as it saves time not having to recreate a bundle for each
>>> iteration.
>>> 
>>> Frankly I believe this shows how little actual development really happens
>>> on Windows. Because of that the development experience is not really
>>> optimized on that platform. With you actively doing so, it may be helpful
>>> to share your experiences so we may make it more attractive for other
>>> Windows oriented contributors.
>> 
>> Has anyone tried Windows Subsystem for Linux
>> (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10)? That might be
>> a less painful development environment for Windows users at least in the
>> short term.
>> 
> I haven't tried it - as far as I know it's not available on Win7.
> 
> But as others have already pointed out there are limitations:
> - from what I have heard it doesn't support GUI applications very well (yet). 
> It is said to be more oriented towards command line utilities.
> - WSL is a virtual machine, so you'd be running a linux application in a VM, 
> not a native application. Granted, the VM is deeply integrated in Windows so 
> for many users the difference may be hardly noticeable.
> 
>> Longer term I think we need to figure out how to make GnuCash buildable in
>> Visual Studio. Recent releases provide for a Clang toolchain as well as the
>> standard MSVC++ one. We might be able to create a build environment
>> combined with vcpkg (https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg) that would be more
>> stable, offer a lower barrier to entry, and generate windows-understandable
>> debug info.
> 
> That would indeed be a more interesting approach. Would that mean we'd have to 
> build the gnucash dependencies in VS as well ? (Aqbanking, guile, webkit,...) 
> Or can VS code link to code built with mingw ? If the latter we could 
> transition in phases: first get GnuCash built and run on VS, while keeping the 
> dependencies as they are, then gradually migrate dependencies (if we want to 
> have the same debug benefits there).

Win7 goes out of support at the end of the year, meaning only really serious security bugs will be fixed (as happened recently with XP). You really should upgrade soon.

Let's please be strict about terminology here, it's important: Visual Studio (VS) is an IDE like Eclipse. The  Microsoft compiler is Visual C/C++ (MSVC). 

Yes, MinGW and MSVC libraries with C linkage can be linked at will. MinGW links the MS runtime, msvcrt, after all. The issue is C++ libraries using C++ linkage. I'm pretty sure that MSVC and gcc use different mangling so C++ libraries won't interlink. LLVM [1] mangling depends on what platform it's building for, https://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html. That probably means that we'll have to build boost before we can build GnuCash.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] VS 2019 can build CMake projects using Clang: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/clang-llvm-support-in-visual-studio/ and that might mangle the sa