Ok, if indeed this is a system limitation that cannot be avoided then why
is the clang compiler not having this problem? It uses exactly the same
argument interface and I was able to compile a test program with much more
than 32k characters given by the response file.

I understand why the limit exists and that it is a Windows specific process
creation limitation. And I agree with your stand that project should be
structure in a way that this limit never occures. However sometimes it's
just not feasible to do because of reasons beyond your controll. I'm not
going too deep into that statement :)

I'm just trying to say that this border can be overcome. There is
definitely room for improvement here. And if possible, why not just admit
it? :)

czw., 22 wrz 2022, 18:04 użytkownik LIU Hao <lh_mouse@126.com> napisał:

> 在 2022-09-22 22:55, mizo 91 写道:
> > Hi LIU Hao,
> >
> > Following that logic, let's just get rid of response file feature while
> we are at it. Why encourage
> > bad programming practices? Why maintain something that doesn't even work
> properly?
> >
> > I think this topic is very underrated and many people working with large
> codebases have problems
> > because of it.
> >
>
> Such limits exist because the Windows NT syscall passes command lines via
> the `UNICODE_STRING`
> struct, which stores the string length as the number of bytes as an
> `unsigned short`. The maximum
> number of UTF-16 code units is consequently 0xFFFF / 2 = 32767.
>
> There isn't "something that doesn't even work properly". It's just the
> system limit. On Linux we
> have a much larger limit (usually a few MiBs) but there is still one.
> Given an arbitrary repository,
> checked out at an arbitrary directory, with an arbitrary number of
> submodules, then it's likely that
> the limit will be hit sooner or later.
>
>
> > For example, let's say I have a project structure of over 100+ modules.
> Each module uses internal
> > headers from other modules. It's much easier to maintain a single global
> "include directories" list
> > than to do it on a per-module basis. Because if something changes in one
> module I would have to
> > rewrite configuraiton for all 100 modules as well. If I'm not mistaken
> Eclise CDT is using this kind
> > of project configuration approach.
> >
> > Additionaly projects may rely on macro definitions to provide
> configuration values through the
> > command line. And for large codebases, there could be hundreds of such
> macros. This alone can easily
> > bring the length of compile command closer to this limit. Of course, you
> can define these macros in
> > the header and add them as another dependency, but this is just a
> workaround, not a solution.
> >
>
> I think I have to disagree here. Response files are there to work around
> the 8-KiB limit of command
> lines in CMD, but it cannot work around system limits. Using a 'config.h'
> of macros is widely known,
> accepted and preferred, rather than passing a lot of macros via command
> line. Similarly, if there
> are too many object files to link, a convenience library or incremental
> linking with `ld -r` will
> usually solve the issue. If you don't want to do these by tampering with
> build systems, xargs may
> help. There are a lot of mature solutions for keeping away from system
> limits, but generally we
> assume our users know what they're doing.
>
>
> > I'm sure there are many different kinds of codebase configurations that
> will rely on this feature.
> > And the people adopting these codebases would hit a brick wall.
> >
> > So yeah this is definitely a 'BUG'. Big one in my opinion.
> >
> >
> --
> Best regards,
> LIU Hao
>
>