Hi Paul. The Universal CTR seems incomplete, I'm not sure if this is
interesting for MinGW and friends since the missing bits would need to be
implemented by hand in a supplementary runtime. Maybe the open source
community could suggest Microsoft to provide a standalone CRT that does not
require MSVC runtime. A more modern runtime with C99 features would be very
welcome as replacement for msvcrt.dll, which is not even an official
Windows component.
I don't think that keeping your operating system up-to-date is undesirable
requirement to develop and execute applications. It seems installers can
trigger the runtime installation. Refusing to move forward because of
ancient insecure operating systems is what is rather undesirable. It is
really incoherent trying to keep everything up-to-date except for the most
important component. In that sense, the idea of maintaining legacy and
universal variants seems insane.
2015-04-30 16:22 GMT-03:00 Paul Moore <[email protected]>:
> On 30 April 2015 at 19:30, Ray Donnelly <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> 1. I see that gcc 5.1 is the latest version - how does that make its
> >> way into msys2? (That's the minor question - I don't have any
> >> particular need for a newer version of gcc)
> >
> > GCC 5.1 presents difficulty for us since the C++ ABI has changed
> > (small string optimisation) which means we'd need to rebuild all C++
> > packages. Before we do that, I'd like to have a CI build system in
> > place for that task. Also, 5.1 doesn't build correctly at the moment.
>
> Thanks for the information. As I say, it's no big deal for me, more a
> matter of curiosity.
>
> >> 2. With the release of Visual C 2015, MS is releasing a new "Universal
> >> CRT". It's not compatible with the older msvcrt, but it has the
> >> advantage of being shipped as an OS component (directly with Windows
> >> 10, and via windows update and vcredist for older versions). How would
> >> support for the universal CRT get added to msys2/gcc? Who deals with
> >> such things? (I'm not able to provide patches or anything like that,
> >> I'd just like to know where to look to see if anyone was working on
> >> this). This is the more major question for me, as I'd like to be able
> >> to compile the xpm library (which needs a Unix-like build environment)
> >> in a way that can be linked with MSVC 2015 (because I want to use that
> >> to build vim, which uses xpm). I have workarounds (basically, don't
> >> use xpm :-)) so it's not a critical issue, I just don't know a
> >> "proper" fix other than mingw support for the universal CRT.
> >
> > MSYS2 supports Windows XP SP3 and above. Are you sure that XP SP3 will
> > support this CRT?
>
> The announcement is at
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/03/03/introducing-the-universal-crt.aspx
>
> According to that ("Distributing Software that uses the Universal CRT"
> point 1 (and 3 for XP)) it is available back to XP (and supported to
> whatever extent Microsoft support XP these days).
>
> > If not (and likely in any case also since want to
> > depend only on stuff that comes with the OS) this would preclude us
> > from switching to the MSVC 2015 Universal CRT.
>
> It would require the appropriate Windows update to be applied on
> systems older than Windows 10, so I can appreciate that would be an
> issue. Having said that, would it be something that could be available
> not as the default, but via a compiler flag? I think mingw used to
> have -lmsvcrt80/90/100 flags for the older MSVC runtimes (I haven't
> used those in years, though, so that may no longer be true)
>
> > AFAIUI to provide
> > binaries linked to that, we'd need to double up our repositories into
> > legacy and universal variants which is a huge task.
>
> Yes, that I can understand is a major obstacle. OK, I consider it
> unlikely that this will happen in that case, which is a fair answer.
>
> > I don't understand
> > why either xpm or vim need to be compiled with MSVC, can you explain
> > that?
>
> Sure. Python 3.5, when released (and the alphas right now), will be
> built with MSVC 2015 and use the universal CRT. To build a Vim which
> embeds Python 3.5, I need to build Vim to use the universal CRT. Vim
> van be built with MSVC, so this is OK. But the XPM support in Vim uses
> a prebuilt libxpm that was built with mingw (some variety). When I
> looked into whether I could build XPM with MSVC, it appears to need
> enough of a Unix toolchain that I was put off trying.
>
> Mixing code compiled for msvcrt and code compiled for the universal
> CRT appears not to work. The final link complains about a missing
> _iob. From what I can see, this is because the universal CRT
> implements stdio differently, so that there's no _iob exposed. Code
> built for msvcrt needs _iob because it's visible in stdio.h (even
> though it's an implementation detail). So, source code using stdio
> needs to be recompiled to be compatible with the universal CRT.
>
> As I say, for my purposes I can just disable XPM support in Vim (it's
> only used for a fairly obscure feature) and just do a fully MSVC 2015
> build. Or ditch embedded Python support (but I do use that for at
> least one plugin). So the world isn't ending.
>
> Mixing mingw-compiled and MSVC-compiled code was always tricky
> (cross-compiler binary compatibility was never guaranteed), but people
> seemed to manage to get it working where needed. I guess the same will
> happen here as time goes on.
>
> Paul
>
>
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