Thursday, January 17, 2013

Mingw64 fail

Last week Gurjeet Singh asked me about getting the MinGW64 compiler working. When I looked I noticed that they has not made an official build for Mingw hosts (as opposed to linux hosts and darwin hosts) since late 2011. I went on IRC and asked why, and was told that they had switched to GYP to generate builds and it was broken on Mingw. Apparently nobody in the GYP project is interested in fixing it because Mingw isn't one of their supported platforms. Someone gave me this URL that describes the problem: http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2197#c6

I was, as they say, gobsmacked. Nobody even really seemed to care that much.

If the build tool doesn't support one of your three main target platforms, and moreover it's the only target which isn't cross-compiling, STOP USING IT.

3 comments:

  1. Andrew,

    FWIW, I don't think mingw64 folks are the only ones mad. I heard similar sentiments from others like Mac users having a hard time getting GYP working. I think that is why they have a force option for scons. So when I built last time about a month ago to build latest plv8 I had to do this:

    scons.py mode=release arch=x64 toolchain=gcc importenv=PATH library=shared I_know_I_should_build_with_GYP=yes

    I'm still not clear the rationale for deprecating scons when it seems to work on more platforms than GYP.

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    Replies
    1. Interesting. I wonder if it's possible to use the same logic to build the mingw64 compiler. It's a pity my python-fu is not a bit stronger.

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  2. I am using the mingw64 compiler. Sorry I forgot to mention that.

    I'm going to update these instructions with the above change. I think I have it in the download readme.

    http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/archives/261-Building-PLV8JS-and-PLCoffee-for-Windows-using-MingW64-w64-w32.html

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