Windows build?

[waywardmonkeys]

What's going to be involved in doing a Windows build of this?

Will vcpkg help?

[Walnut356]

I've been fiddling with this for a little while - I'm not very experienced at all with these sorts of builds, so take all this with a grain of salt. Some of the details might not be relevant, there's a bunch of LLDB-dependent things i've been looking at so i'm sure some of the "what's a problem for which project" have gotten mixed up in my head.

Messing with lldb-sys's build script, I pingponged back and forth between it refusing to build due to a variety of errors, and it building but immediately failing at runtime due to unresolved external symbols or lacking an entrypoint. Genuinely, I think I just don't know enough about the build process to fix those issues. Researching it has been less than fruitful.

The most promising long-term option seems like it would involve treating the clang-sys build script as a template. clang-sys offers both dynamic and static linking which is nice. iirc it's slightly more annoying to do both with LLDB since this pr is held up for slightly silly reasons.

There's several other issues, since compared to linux, windows distributions of LLVM all suck. vcpkg can be a bit slow about updating to the latest version. Other distributions (winlibs, llvm-mingw, choco, etc.) either don't include LLDB, don't have the include headers, or have the include headers but don't have SBLanguages.h (which is generated at compile time), some don't have the appropriate scripting and such build in, etc. etc. etc. It's all a mess.

There's nothing equivalent to liblldb-dev from what I can tell. It's not too bad to run the python script that generates SBLanguages.h or snag it from the debian package manually, but it still feels sorta jank. Building from source is a bit excessive, but also works, though that carries some painpoints of its own.

If you have any suggestions please let me know, I'm pretty interested in getting this working on windows.