Building with Microsoft Visual Studio

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1

I am working on a port of LLVM targeting a proprietary VM. Thus far
development has been under Linux and Cygwin. Cygwin licensing would appear
to require that LLVM built under Cygwin would have to be released under the
GPL, so alternatives are being investigated.

Using MS Visual Studio and following the instructions at
http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStartedVS.html (Getting Started with the LLVM
System using Microsoft Visual Studio Overview) has not been successful.

From the instructions:

With anonymous Subversion access:
cd where-you-want-llvm-to-live
svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm-top/trunk llvm-top
make checkout MODULE=llvm
cd llvm
...
Simply double click on the solution file llvm/win32/llvm.sln.

Questions:

1. "make" and "svn" are not Windows commands. In what environment are these
commands supposed to be used?
2. What is this "make checkout MODULE=llvm" about? After checking out the
sources the directory will be empty apart from the llvm-top subdirectory, so
where is the Makefile for this?
3. If you obtain the sources under Cygwin and build in Visual Studio,
absolutely nothing works: many files are missing. This is hardly surprising
because there has been no configure step.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

2

Richard Smith wrote:

I am working on a port of LLVM targeting a proprietary VM. Thus far
development has been under Linux and Cygwin. Cygwin licensing would appear
to require that LLVM built under Cygwin would have to be released under the
GPL, so alternatives are being investigated.

Using MS Visual Studio and following the instructions at
http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStartedVS.html (Getting Started with the LLVM
System using Microsoft Visual Studio Overview) has not been successful.

Have you tried MinGW? Coming from a *nix background, I find MinGW far
easier to use than the microsoft tools.

Erik

3

This is another possible way forward. Like you, I am more familiar with a
Posix environment - but there are those I work with who would prefer the
Visual Studio solution if it were possible.

4

Hola Richard,

I think I'm the primary person using / maintaining the VStudio build.
Every so often I checkout and make sure things are still building, but
do occasionally get behind if a lot of new files are getting added to
the LLVM svn tree. What isn't working for you? I'll try and clarify
the steps in the doc or fix the build issue.

Please note that a lot of the tools and tests aren't built by the
VStudio files. Nor does it integrate the front end stuff. Mostly it's
for generating LLVM structures and execution via JIT or interpreter.

Thanks,
Chuck.