[martell]

mingw-w64 llvm maintainer/developer here.

Over the past 2-3 years, with great help from a few other LLVM devs I have slowly pushed for native clang support for mingw-w64. With the current in tree HEAD you can now build and bootstrap mingw-w64 with a llvm-only toolchain (no binutils or gcc, thus no disregard of the PECOFF SPEC)

The stack is as follows. LLVM+CLANG+LLD+COMPILER-RT+LIBCXX+LIBCXXABI+LIBUNWIND+MINGW-W64.

The libraries and executables built this way can be dropped into visual studio quite easily, the two environments are now basically interchangeable. This also means we can borrow the PDB debugging work by Zachary Turner and/or any msvc features added to llvm for free that was done by the various googlers working on chrome. See a talk from Reid on the most recent LLVM developer meetup for more info on PDB and how it works. There has been no formal release of this environment yet but you should see something in the coming weeks/months. I keep build scripts here for those interested.

https://github.com/martell/mingw-w64-clang

I'm due another cleanup of the repo now that wine 3.0 is out so I can actually run x64 tests within a linux docker container. I'm going to be doing some blogging to make this more visible with various partners that want to support this.

The most interesting part of this for me was implementing a llvm-dlltool alternative to binutils dlltool that actually works within the PECOFF spec so msvc lib.exe and link.exe likes what it produces.

https://reviews.llvm.org/rL308379

[zturner]

This sounds great, it's been a long time coming and I'm sure many people will appreciate being able to debug their mingw generated executables in Visual Studio.

I did all of the PDB stuff in LLVM, happy to help if you need it (ping me on the mailing list or IRC)

[martell]

Updated the comment to reflect this. :) Thanks for all the good work. Will ping you when I move onto that stage for support.

[tavert]

Excellent work. I like to ignore visual studio completely and pretend it doesn't exist, but that's just me :) I've used cygwin's cross-compiler x86_64-w64-mingw32-clang package once in a while, though I find more projects' build systems choke on it and do the wrong thing (libgmp as a notable example) than with x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc.

[martell]

I tend to ignore both gcc and MSVC. Clang is really good at bootstrapping itself with this setup even when cross compiling without any real complexity. Without diverting into a cmake vs autotools battle I like that llvm and clang just work and bootstrap so easily. Gone are the days of messing around with gmp isl and co to bootstrap a toolchain.

[tavert]

Fair enough, but I actually need gmp more for runtime math, plus fortran deps like lapack and more obscure things. Maybe flang will be production-worthy some day - do you know if they're still outputting a textual representation of IR into string buffers?

[brucedawson]

I've been watching the process of getting git to build with VS, but it's sounding like mingw-w64 will gain PDB output faster than the VS version will happen. Either way, if I can debug (and profile) git.exe then I'm happy.

[Ericson2314]

Great work! We with Nixpkgs/NixOS have over the past year overhauled cross compilation, culminating recently with a bunch of parallel efforts recently including Windows cross compilation. People have built Nix with cygwin in the past, it would be nice to get it working in MSYS2/mingw-w64 too.

[jacobush]

Are you targeting Linux, building on Windows?

[Ericson2314]

No reason we couldn't expand into doing that!

[amedvednikov]

Thanks for your work. mingw-w64 is amazing!