Re: Building GNUstep for Windows using Clang

[Frederik Seiffert]

Hi all,

Following up on this thread I wanted to give a quick update on building GNUstep for Windows.

First, I managed to build Base successfully using GCC on MinGW 64-bit following Riccardo’s helpful instructions at http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Installation_MSYS2.

Two small things here (I can’t edit the wiki, so would be great if someone could add these):

1. The build instructions for Make are obviously missing a "make install" step.

2. I also had to install the following packages for ICU:

- mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-icu

- msys/icu-devel

I did not have to patch the MSYS2 headers as written in the instructions, but maybe that’s only needed for Gui?

It does show a lot of warnings during build, some of which look somewhat concerning. If I find some time I’ll try to add a Windows OS target to the Travis setup to run the tests and ensure this is kept working.

As a side note, Make doesn’t seem to handle spaces in the home directory correctly – does someone know where to fix this?

$ /mingw64/bin/gnustep-config --objc-flags

-MMD -MP -DGNUSTEP -DGNUSTEP_BASE_LIBRARY=1 -DGNU_RUNTIME=1 -DGNUSTEP_BASE_LIBRARY=1 -DGNUSTEP_WITH_DLL -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-omit-frame-pointer -Wall -DGSWARN -DGSDIAGNOSE -Wno-import -g -O2 -fconstant-string-class=NSConstantString -I. -I/home/Frederik -ISeiffert/GNUstep/Library/Headers -I/mingw64/include

Moving on to building with Clang and libobjc2, as mentioned in an earlier message to this thread, I first built libobjc2 in a Visual Studio command prompt using CMake and clang-cl, which according to David is the way to go.

I’ve then been trying two approaches for building GNUstep:

1. Using MinGW 32/64-bit, and setting CC/CXX env vars to Clang:

I have not been able to get this to work at all so far, as I can’t figure out how to change the linker to LLD or ld.gold, as required for this setup. Neither setting LD=lld or LDFLAGS="-fuse-ld=lld" or "=gold" seems to have any effect. Calling "clang --print-prog-name=ld" (which is what Make does to check which linker is being used) will always output ld. I’m probably missing something here – can anyone point me in the right direction how to change the linker?

2. Using the llvm-mingw toolchain (https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw), which is preconfigured to use LLD:

This goes pretty far (after a couple fixes I pushed yesterday), but in the end fails for me with the following:

No rule to make target 'Additions/obj/subproject.o', needed by 'obj/libgnustep-base.a'

I’d appreciate any thoughts on the above.

Thanks!

Frederik