Hey Herb,

Not everyone whose embedding WebKit on Windows announces to us that they’re 
using it so unsure if someone is still compiling using MSVC. All the 
documentation we have points to clang-cl being the preferred way. The ones we 
know of Bun, https://bun.sh/ , and Playwright, https://playwright.dev/ , have 
switched to clang-cl.

I was personally keeping the dream alive and would compile out WebKit with 
MSVC. WebKit on Windows doesn’t have the highest tier JITs because we don’t 
have anyone working on it for Windows and the maintenance costs around MSVC are 
centered around that. If MSVC had the functionality that helps the JSC folks 
make the VM run fast we wouldn’t be in this situation. If that functionality is 
added to the roadmap then we’d definitely reconsider at that time.

Don

From: Herb Sutter <herb.sut...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 2, 2024 1:28 PM
To: Olmstead, Don <don.olmst...@sony.com>; 'Jean-Yves Avenard' 
<jean-yves.aven...@apple.com>
Cc: 'WebKit-Dev Development' <webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org>
Subject: RE: [webkit-dev] Proposal: Dropping MSVC support and use clang-cl 
exclusively on Windows

Thank you, Jean-Yves and Don!

One followup: I don’t know WebKit well but was surprised that it was being 
built with MSVC, and Yusuke mentioned Windows projects that build with clang-cl 
instead. Are there known users/products who are building with WebKit that are 
important not to break, so that we (Microsoft) should be thinking about doing 
work so you can keep using MSVC, or is this really an unused configuration that 
it makes sense to just drop?

Herb


From: Olmstead, Don <don.olmst...@sony.com<mailto:don.olmst...@sony.com>>
Sent: Thursday, May 2, 2024 12:06 PM
To: Jean-Yves Avenard 
<jean-yves.aven...@apple.com<mailto:jean-yves.aven...@apple.com>>; Herb Sutter 
<herb.sut...@gmail.com<mailto:herb.sut...@gmail.com>>
Cc: WebKit-Dev Development 
(webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org>) 
<webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org>>
Subject: RE: [webkit-dev] Proposal: Dropping MSVC support and use clang-cl 
exclusively on Windows

Hi Herb

If you grep around the WebKit codebase for COMPILER(MSVC) there are a number of 
workarounds hanging out. Some may have been fixed over time but the workaround 
wasn’t removed.

Biggest issue was around the JIT and some other low level features the JSC 
folks utilize that isn’t present in MSVC. The lion’s share of JSC development 
is done using Clang and those working on it don’t have a Windows box handy so 
we have seen the JIT break on Windows. Yusuke I’m sure has a list of feature 
requests that would improve the quality of MSVC for people developing VMs.

MSVC has definitely caught some issues in the code and compiler mono-culture 
isn’t great but realistically we don’t have the resources to keep MSVC up and 
running.

Regards,
Don

From: Jean-Yves Avenard via webkit-dev 
<webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org>>
Sent: Wednesday, May 1, 2024 5:10 PM
To: Herb Sutter <herb.sut...@gmail.com<mailto:herb.sut...@gmail.com>>
Cc: Webkit Development List 
<webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org>>
Subject: Re: [webkit-dev] Proposal: Dropping MSVC support and use clang-cl 
exclusively on Windows

Hi

On 2 May 2024, at 10:07 am, Herb Sutter via webkit-dev 
<webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org<mailto:webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org>> wrote:


We’ve had full C++20 including concepts for a couple of years so I wasn’t sure 
what problem you were running into… are you encountering bugs in those 
features? or you can’t turn on /std:c++20 for some reason? or are you using an 
older pre-concepts (pre-VS2022 17.0) compiler?

Thanks for any feedback you have time to share.

Herb


We’ve had issues where some use of concepts made the latest MSVC compiler crash
See 
https://searchfox.org/wubkat/source/Source/WTF/wtf/TypeTraits.h#145-172<https://searchfox.org/wubkat/source/Source/WTF/wtf/TypeTraits.h#145-172>

See 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261598<https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261598>

Jean-Yves
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