90 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
90 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
LLVM MinGW
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==========
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This is a recipe for reproducibly building a
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[LLVM](https://llvm.org)/[Clang](https://clang.llvm.org/)/[LLD](https://lld.llvm.org/)
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based mingw-w64 toolchain.
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Benefits of a LLVM based MinGW toolchain are:
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- Support for targeting ARM/ARM64 (while GCC obviously does support
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these architectures, it doesn't support Windows on ARM)
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- A single toolchain targeting all four architectures (i686, x86_64,
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armv7 and arm64) instead of separate compiler binaries for each
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architecture
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Clang on its own can also be used as compiler in the normal GNU binutils
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based environments though, so the main difference lies in replacing
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binutils with LLVM based tools.
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This is similar to https://github.com/martell/mingw-w64-clang, with
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the exact same goal but with a slightly different mechanism for
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building it, allowing a full from-scratch build of all components
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in one command.
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The only prerequisite for building is Docker; you can also follow the
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steps of the Dockerfile and build manually within a normal linux
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environment, but Docker provides reproducibility by building in a known,
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empty environment.
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To build, just do:
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docker build .
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This will download and build all parts of the toolchain, and build a few
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demo apps to show and verify that the toolchain works.
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The produced toolchain can be extracted by running this command with the
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image id from the `docker build` command above (ending with e.g.
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`Successfully built d8b13aad965a`):
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./extract-docker.sh d8b13aad965a prefix
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This copies the directory `prefix` (which contains the whole toolchain,
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with headers and link libraries for all four architectures) from the
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built docker image into the current directory.
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The Dockerfile currently builds in an Ubuntu 16.04 environment, so the
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extracted toolchain can at least be used in such an environment.
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The extracted toolchain can be used by adding `prefix/bin` to `$PATH`
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and calling e.g. `x86_64-w64-ming32-clang`.
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(If using the extracted toolchain in an environment that already have
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got a normal GCC based MinGW toolchain with the same triplet prefix in
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the same path, you may need to add
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`--sysroot=path/to/prefix/x86_64-w64-mingw32` to the clang commands.)
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Other branches in this repo contain patches that might not have been
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merged upstream yet, and tests of building third party projects using
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the toolchain. This includes more tool frontends/wrappers with the
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usual binutils names, to allow using it as a drop-in replacement for
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a normal MinGW toolchain.
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Status
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------
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The toolchain currently does support both C and C++, including support
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for exception handling.
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It is in practice quite new and immature and haven't been proven with a
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large number of projects yet though. You will probably run into issues
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building non-trivial projects.
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Known issues
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------------
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LLD, the LLVM linker, is what causes most of the major differences to the
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normal GCC/binutils based MinGW.
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- LLD doesn't support using import libraries created by GNU tools.
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- LLD doesn't automatically fix up use of data symbols from DLLs without
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the dllimport attributes.
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- The C++ libraries ([libcxxabi](http://libcxxabi.llvm.org/), [libcxx](http://libcxx.llvm.org/)) can only be linked statically
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at the moment.
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- The C++ libraries and unwinder aren't built with exceptions support for
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ARM64 target at the moment. (The toolchain and libraries themselves do
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support it though.)
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- The ARM64 target doesn't support thread local variables.
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Additionally, one may run into other minor differences between GCC and clang.
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