Wed, 16 Apr 2008

Cross Compiling for Legacy Win32 Systems (Part 1).

My main two FOSS projects, libsndfile and libsamplerate have significant numbers of users that are tied to that particularly odious legacy system, Microsoft Windows. Since I don't normally use Windows myself, maintaining support for that OS has always been a huge pain in the neck.

Originally I shipped Microsoft project files for libsndfile, but that became unworkable because the different versions of the Microsoft tools (Visual C++ 5, Visual C++ 6, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005 etc) used different and incompatible project file formats. I solved this by shipping a simple Makefile that used Microsoft's nmake and the command line compilers to build libsndfile. However, by about 2004, the Microsoft compiler's complete lack of support for the 1999 ISO C Standard made maintaining support too much trouble, so it was dropped.

Instead, I started using Cygwin and MinGW to compile libsndfile on Windows. Both of these tool-sets use a version of the GNU GCC compiler just like Linux and building libsndfile using these two tool-sets was trivial: 


  ./configure
  make
  make check

Of course there were howls of protest from Windows users, but since they (with a small number of exceptions) had contributed so little, I didn't fell like I owed them anything. I also started releasing pre-compiled Windows binaries at the same time as the source code tarballs were released.

However, while the MinGW compiler was a huge improvement over the Microsoft one it was still a huge pain in the neck. I had to keep a Windows machine and keep it updated and patched against vulnerabilities. Furthermore, installing and updating MinGW was a painful manual process. Oh how I longed for a Debian/Ubuntu style apt-get command to look for and install updates. Finally, copying source code back and forth between Linux and Windows while debugging Windows issues was another pain point because version control systems like GNU Arch and bzr simply didn't work very well on Windows.

In about 2004, I tried the MinGW Linux to Windows cross compiler, a compiler that runs on Linux but generates binaries for Windows. This compiler worked, but left one rather large problem; how do I run libsndfile's rather large and comprehensive test suite? Compiling libsndfile without running the test suite is a waste of time. I did try to run the tests under WINE (the Windows emulator), but at the time tests were failing under WINE that didn't fail on Windows.

From that time on, I would try running the cross-compiled test suite under WINE once or twice a year. Then, some time in the last year or so, the number of problems with the test suite dropped to one, which was only a FIXME message. A little hacking on the WINE sources resulted in a patch that was sent to the WINE mailing list and has since been applied to the main WINE source tree.

With that bug fixed, I can now cross compile from Linux to Windows and run the full libsndfile test suite under WINE. That means that Windows has just become that little bit less relevant that it was before.

A future post will explain how to set up the cross compiler and WINE and walk through compiling and testing of a standard FOSS project.

Posted at: 23:12 | Category: CodeHacking/MinGWCross | Permalink