Windows & MSVC support

[dcharkes]

Useful references:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/walkthrough-compile-a-c-program-on-the-command-line?view=msvc-170
• https://github.com/microsoft/vswhere

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Hi!

Thank you for your work! When you'll do Windows support, here are some details for searching and integrating with Visual Studio (for good or bad, it's a main development tool for C/C++ on Windows).

Some environmental variables provided by Visual Studio Developer console (in my example I have VS installed on non standard disk "D", so that's edge case for you from the start and I have optional Clang installation from VS):

VisualStudioVersion=17.0

VSINSTALLDIR=D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\

VS170COMNTOOLS=D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Common7\Tools\

VCIDEInstallDir=D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Common7\IDE\VC\
VCINSTALLDIR=D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\

VCToolsInstallDir=D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.35.32215\
VCToolsRedistDir=D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Redist\MSVC\14.34.31931\

Also, I have manually configured LLVM_INSTALL_DIR common variable for LLVM/Clang, It can be configured via standalone LLVM/Clang installation, that is independent of VS:

LLVM_INSTALL_DIR=D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\Llvm\x64

Personally I prefer Clang to Microsoft toolchain, because Clang have more meaningful error messages.

For `x64` target env this gives forllowing paths:

CL:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.35.32215\bin\Hostx64\x64\cl.exe

Link:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.35.32215\bin\Hostx64\x64\link.exe

Clang:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\Llvm\x64\bin\clang.exe

LLD:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\Llvm\x64\bin\lld.exe

For `x86` target this gives forllowing paths:

CL:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.35.32215\bin\Hostx86\x86\cl.exe

Link:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.35.32215\bin\Hostx86\x86\link.exe

Clang:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\Llvm\bin\clang.exe

LLD:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\Llvm\bin\lld.exe

Originally posted by @Zekfad in #3 (comment)

[dcharkes]

Hi @Zekfad,

Are you referring to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/reference/command-prompt-powershell?view=vs-2022 for the environment variables?

I have installed Visual Studio 2019 via the Visual Studio Installer, and that did not add any environment variables to my system.

Are these environment variables set only in the terminals inside Visual Studio? Or did you use a different installer? Or this an installer option?

I'm trying to understand how/when we can rely on these environment variables being set.

[dcharkes]

I believe https://github.com/microsoft/vswhere to be a better solution.

[Zekfad]

Hi @dcharkes, indeed, I was talking about Developer Command Prompt you mentioned in the link.
Haven't even heard of vswhere, looks nice that there are such tool, and that it's included in VS Installer.
I think it would be good to try to use it and fallback to environment variables of it's unavailable.