Re: [Libunwind-devel] checking out libunwind on Windows

[Lassi Tuura]

Hi,

> In a whim of me overestimating myself, I decided to see what would need to be 
> worked on for libunwind to work on Windows.
> 
> Unfortunately, I cannot checkout the sources due to the fact that there is a 
> directory in the source tree that uses a "forbidden" name on Windows: "aux". 
> Stupid, I know, I didn't write Windows ;-)
> 
> Could this be fixed? In the meantime I'll see what manually extracting a 
> snapshot and renaming the dir can do for me.
> 
> In the future I'd be interested in *trying* (as hard as I can) to port this 
> stuff to Windows. The ultimate goal would be a complete LLVM toolchain: 
> compiler-rt/libunwind/libcxxrt/libc++ with Clang. The linker (binutils ld) is 
> another story... Any tips and pointers to help me will be welcome!

Out of curiosity, why do you want to use libunwind on windows? The windows 
executable formats are vastly different from those currently supported by 
libunwind, so this would likely be some amount of work. Besides, there's 
Windows API for walking stacks via the Debug Help library, see 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms680650(v=vs.85).aspx 
and other functions in the reference section; there's also the older IMAGEHLP. 
I believe everything needed is installed on all reasonably modern systems (XP 
and up).

A lot of the concepts behind it were described years ago in MSJ in "Under the 
Hood" series by Matt Pietrek. I haven't done a great deal of this kind of 
Windows programming lately, but it seems the APIs have survived. I have some 
code for 32-bit Windows lying about which I think still works, in case you'd 
find that useful, but there's no shortage of examples on the net for using 
those APIs.

Regards,
Lassi