Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] MXE and wclang

[Timothy Gu]

On Apr 15, 2014 5:07 PM, "Thomas Pöchtrager" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Am 2014-04-15 17:47, schrieb Tony Theodore:
> >
> > On 15 Apr 2014, at 16:11, Nagaev Boris <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello!
> >>
> >> There are great tools MXE and wclang. MXE automates build of windows
> >> binaries from Linux, wclang wrapps clang for cross-compilation to
> >> Windows. Why not to use them together? Could developers of MXE
> >> integrate wclang into MXE?
> >
> > Hi Boris,
> >
> > wclang looks like overkill if we were going to introduce clang support in MXE. We’d have a specific version to support and predictable paths, so would simply use shell wrappers for the cross-tools (as we do with pkg-config). We’d probably also use the llvm equivalents of binutils and build the runtime from source (it’s not clear how much wclang depends on an existing cross-toolchain).
> >
> > From the looks of it, you can probably already use both yourself - with some symlinks and $PATH manipulation. There’s some hard-coded gcc/g++ calls in MXE (particularly test invocations), and we could be better about respecting “CC".
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Tony
> >
>
> Hi,
>
> wclang uses the mingw toolchain (including its libs, headers, linker,
> windres, ...) therefore it should work out of the box.

Yes. wclang (and clang in general) only acts as 'gcc', and llvm doesn't offer their copy of binutils.

>
> But I guess porting all packages would be a lot of work and I don't
> think its worth the effort.
>
> Another aspect is that the LLVM/Clang team doesn't seem to care a lot
> about the mingw target anymore (as they have an MSVC target now - which
> is indeed much more important).

I think wclang package should be provided, but we should not provide it as an alternative to gcc to build MXE packages. Users can use wclang in their projects is if desired, but using it for MXE packages is too complex.

Timothy