Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#41

Post by martell » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

zturner wrote: post #37

martell wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mingw-w64 llvm maintainer/developer here. Over the past 2-3 years, with great help from a few other LLVM devs I have slowly pushed for native clang support for mingw-w64. With the current in tree HEAD you can now build and bootstrap mingw-w64 with a llvm-only toolchain (no binutils or gcc, thus no disregard of the PECOFF SPEC) The stack is as follows. LLVM+CLANG+LLD+COMPILER-RT+LIBCXX+LIBCXXABI+LIBUNWIND+MINGW-W64. T…

This sounds great, it's been a long time coming and I'm sure many people will appreciate being able to debug their mingw generated executables in Visual Studio. I did all of the PDB stuff in LLVM, happy to help if you need it (ping me on the mailing list or IRC)

Updated the comment to reflect this. :) Thanks for all the good work. Will ping you when I move onto that stage for support.

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#42

Post by evmar » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 11:45 PM UTC

We first started fiddling with Clang for Chrome in late 2010: http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/01/clang.h...

The original work was just finding bugs in the codebase and compiler. It's gone so far!

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#43

Post by nice_byte » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 11:54 PM UTC

tzahola wrote: post #40

nice_byte wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use it? llvm is the future anyway and lots of players have a stake in it and contribute to it. In fact, there are way too many c++ compilers if you ask me. I would gladly accept a world where clang is the one and only.

>I would gladly accept a world where clang is the one and only. And luckily you don’t have any saying in such matters.

Sure. I just vote with my feet, like many others.

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#44

Post by brucedawson » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 12:05 AM UTC

martell wrote: post #32

tavert wrote: post #7

> if your project is Windows-only, you can get a second compiler’s opinion on your code, and Clang’s warnings might find bugs GCC (mingw.org and mingw-w64 triples) has existed and been able to do this, including and especially cross-compiling, for a long time. No need to manually download a Windows SDK either. edited to add: to be fair, it's not ABI compatible with MSVC. But it deserves a mention and it's an easier o…

mingw-w64 llvm maintainer/developer here. Over the past 2-3 years, with great help from a few other LLVM devs I have slowly pushed for native clang support for mingw-w64. With the current in tree HEAD you can now build and bootstrap mingw-w64 with a llvm-only toolchain (no binutils or gcc, thus no disregard of the PECOFF SPEC) The stack is as follows. LLVM+CLANG+LLD+COMPILER-RT+LIBCXX+LIBCXXABI+LIBUNWIND+MINGW-W64. T…

I've been watching the process of getting git to build with VS, but it's sounding like mingw-w64 will gain PDB output faster than the VS version will happen. Either way, if I can debug (and profile) git.exe then I'm happy.

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#45

Post by evmar » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 12:10 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #3

Last time I tried to build Chrome/Chromium I had to mess about with this build system called Ninja. (Which worked well it was just awkward to set up on Windows). Is that still in play?

Can you elaborate on the difficulty on Windows? If you go to the home page there is a section "Getting Ninja" that links to a page with a zip file... ?

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#46

Post by brucedawson » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 12:14 AM UTC

bigcheesegs wrote: post #35

CyberDildonics wrote: post #31

I've tried clang for windows twice. Each time the problem hasn't been the compiler, which works well, it has been which library to use with it on windows. Clang 5.0 worked well up until I needed the filesystem library, which isn't there. Does anyone know if it still relies on the visual studio C++ library?

clang-cl is just a compiler. It relies on VS to provide the C and C++ standard libraries. VS 2017 has the filesystem library and it should work with clang-cl 6.

To elaborate on that, if you want to build Chromium for Windows you currently still need to install Visual Studio. We don't use its compiler anymore but we use its linker and other tools, its header files, and its libraries. Many Chromium developers also use it for editing code, and for debugging code.

Chrome is currently built using VS 2017 15.3 (that's update 3). Eventually we will probably upgrade to VS 2017 15.7 in order to get more STL conformance, linker improvements, etc.

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#47

Post by wongmjane » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 12:18 AM UTC

quickben wrote: post #14

Interesting. It seems Google is moving away from anything gpl/gnu lately (fuchsia, etc...)

I think it is mainly due to their concerns over the Tivoization clause which is added to GPLv3

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#48

Post by Ono-Sendai » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 12:20 AM UTC

Great work by the Clang team, well done!

I'm a bit surprised to see that build times in Clang are worse, and that resulting binary performance is comparable.

Maybe that will change when the Clang build starts to use LTCG, as the article mentions.

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#49

Post by tavert » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 12:23 AM UTC

martell wrote: post #32

tavert wrote: post #7

> if your project is Windows-only, you can get a second compiler’s opinion on your code, and Clang’s warnings might find bugs GCC (mingw.org and mingw-w64 triples) has existed and been able to do this, including and especially cross-compiling, for a long time. No need to manually download a Windows SDK either. edited to add: to be fair, it's not ABI compatible with MSVC. But it deserves a mention and it's an easier o…

mingw-w64 llvm maintainer/developer here. Over the past 2-3 years, with great help from a few other LLVM devs I have slowly pushed for native clang support for mingw-w64. With the current in tree HEAD you can now build and bootstrap mingw-w64 with a llvm-only toolchain (no binutils or gcc, thus no disregard of the PECOFF SPEC) The stack is as follows. LLVM+CLANG+LLD+COMPILER-RT+LIBCXX+LIBCXXABI+LIBUNWIND+MINGW-W64. T…

Excellent work. I like to ignore visual studio completely and pretend it doesn't exist, but that's just me :) I've used cygwin's cross-compiler x86_64-w64-mingw32-clang package once in a while, though I find more projects' build systems choke on it and do the wrong thing (libgmp as a notable example) than with x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc.

Re: Clang Is Now Used to Build Chrome for Windows

#50

Post by AlexeyBrin » Tue, Mar 06, 2018, 12:23 AM UTC

chandlerc1024 wrote: post #26

bgussen wrote: post #21

Did the LLVM folks fix the C++ structured exception handling incompatibility between MSVC compiled DLLs/programs and LLVM compiled ones? This was a problem for many years.

Yes. (To the extent possible. There are some edge cases left, but they're very rare. Essentially all the real-world code we've seen works now.)

Tried to install Clang 5.0 Visual Studio integration, unfortunately it seems that I need to install VS 2015 (v140) compiler since it doesn't work with VS 2017 (v141).