Compiling gcc sources under MSVC

Compiling gcc sources under MSVC

[Alexander]

Hello gcc-help,

  I am a developer from Russia. Our company started beneficent educational
program faced to programming. We have a question - how to compile gcc
sources at MSVC6.0 or 7.0? Can someone help?

-- 
Best regards,
 Alexander                          mailto:a.shabanov@inteluscodefactory.com

Re: Compiling gcc sources under MSVC

[Artūras Moskvinas]

>  I am a developer from Russia. Our company started beneficent educational
>program faced to programming. We have a question - how to compile gcc
>sources at MSVC6.0 or 7.0? Can someone help?
>
>  
>
Hmmm, I think it is impossible to compile GCC (Gnu Compiler Collection) 
using MSVC6.0 or 7.0, they have not enough "capabilities" for gcc 
compilation.
If you need gcc (binary distribution) for windows, use www.cygwin.com or 
www.mingw.org.

Arturas M.

Re: Compiling gcc sources under MSVC

[Alexander]

  My purpose is use only MSVC to build GCC. It is not impossible,
  because GCC's sources are ANSI C compliant, but seems very hard due
  to many specific *nix - dependencies, such as unistd.h(Am I wrong?) and others.
  I worked with MSVC many years, so it will be very dufficult to change my
  course :)
  And it will be great surprise to all Win-developers who want explore
  complicated GCC's code  - convinient VS.Net IDE, powerfull Boundchecker and
  exciting VisualAssist! :)
  I know about "religious wars" between GNU
  community and world of commercial software, but...

  Maybe someone can help?

-- 
Best regards,
 Alexander                          mailto:a.shabanov@inteluscodefactory.com

Re: Compiling gcc sources under MSVC

[Brian Dessent]

Alexander wrote:

>   My purpose is use only MSVC to build GCC. It is not impossible,
>   because GCC's sources are ANSI C compliant, but seems very hard due
>   to many specific *nix - dependencies, such as unistd.h(Am I wrong?) and others.
>   I worked with MSVC many years, so it will be very dufficult to change my
>   course :)
>   And it will be great surprise to all Win-developers who want explore
>   complicated GCC's code  - convinient VS.Net IDE, powerfull Boundchecker and
>   exciting VisualAssist! :)

I still don't think it's possible.  Even if you got gcc to bootstrap
with MSVC, the only thing that would be compiled by MSVC would be the
stage 1 xgcc - which would then be used to compile stage 2, and so on. 
So the final gcc would be compiled by gcc, not by MSVC, and would have
gcc debug information (stabs or dwarf2) not MSVC debug information (.pdb
/ codeview) and there would be no way to debug it using the visual
studio tools.  As far as I know (and I could be wrong) the only part of
gcc that is pure ANSI is this stripped down C-only stage 1 compiler,
with the actual full gcc requiring itself to compile.

And that's assuming that you used the command line cl.exe/link.exe and a
port of bash and make so that you can run all the existing build
scripts.  If you're actually talking about trying to use the IDE and
create a visual studio project to do the build, then you're even farther
out in space.  You would certainly have a great deal of work to do it
that way and I can't even see the reason anyone would want to do it, for
the reason above that you'd only be compiling the stage 1 bootstrap
compiler with MSVC anyway.

Brian

Re: Compiling gcc sources under MSVC

[Atwood, Robert C]

>I wanna only to get convinient debugging tool.
....

>It will be great if you'll advise how to conviniently debug GCC under
cygwin.
>-- 
>Best regards,
> Alexander 


How about ddd? It is available via the Cygwin installer. I haven't tried
it on anythign as complex as the compiler itself though.


Robert

Re: Compiling gcc sources under MSVC

[Alexander]

  It really seems almost impossible :(

  I wanna only to get convinient debugging tool. All that I want now -
  to explore and change some part of C++ compiler's code (at 'parsing'
  and 'tree' levels) - I want to implement my own interface (GUI - for
  convinient purposes), that will control middle-end.
  Maybe gdb is really convinient tool, but I wasnt experienced in
  using it.
  It will be great if you'll advise how to conviniently debug GCC under cygwin.

PS: We can build several GCC's parts (I tried to build cc1plus) under MSVC in
one case: If we previously used cygwin to build it, and then, after
creating obj directory, use generated *.h, *.c files. I nearly
could do it - I compiled all files, that compiled in gcc's cc1plus build
except libcpp's and libintl's files.

-- 
Best regards,
 Alexander                          mailto:a.shabanov@inteluscodefactory.com