[Mesa-dev] NIR and MSVC

[Jose Fonseca]

On 15/01/15 15:39, Jason Ekstrand wrote:
> I just pushed NIR to master.  I wanted to write a couple of notes about
> the interaction between that code and MSVC and what the current plan
> is.  Right now, NIR won't build with MSVC; at least not MSVC 2010 (or is
> it 11?) as it uses quite a bit of C99.  It should be mostly MSVC 2013
> safe except for 2 or 3 placs we use explicit initializers with unions.
> That said, the MSVC build isn't broken as it also doesn't build with
> scons.  That was very intentional on my part as I want to buy some time
> so we can push now and deal with the MSVC issues later.
>
> I'm CCing Eric because he is planning to use NIR in the vc4 backend and
> possibly in the frontend to do GLSL IR -> NIR -> TGSI.  This can use can
> probably also be made to be a compile-time option until the time comes
> when you are able to finally start building with MSVC 2013.  The biggest
> issue here is that it would give us two GLSL -> NIR translation path to
> keep up which could prove somewhat painful so I don't think we want to
> have both long-term.  As I don't know what your timetable is on that, I
> can't say much more.
>
> Thanks,
> --Jason Ekstrand

We're actually using Windows SDK 7.0.7600, which bundles MSVC 2008. 
gallium and llvmpipe will probably need to continue building with this 
compiler for the foreseeable future. As we don't have control over the 
choice of the compiler there.

But for Mesa and OpenGL statetracker (hence NIR) it _might_ be possible 
to move faster, as the OpenGL driver is pretty much an independent 
component, so we have a bit more control.  But even so we'll need to 
research exactly what's involved (it depends at least on having MSVC2013 
available on build farm.)

So I can't provide a timetable now, but I'll see what's feasible.

Jose