On Thu, Dec 6, 2018, at 6:08 PM, Gijs Kruitbosch wrote: > Can someone elaborate on what this means for debugging on Windows, and > for our onboarding story on Windows?
For debugging: as others have pointed out, nothing should change. For onboarding we will continue to require users to install Visual C++ and then `mach bootstrap` will install clang-cl and other things. We can and should improve that to make getting started on Windows simpler. > I don't do this very often, but I ran into this today and the story is > already very poor. This sucks, I'm sorry, but it's tangential to the discussion here. If you'd like to file some bugs on the docs and such we can obviously get those fixed. Ideally `mach run --debug` should do the right thing here. If it doesn't we should fix that. > It also seems worth bearing in mind that despite the vast majority of > our users being on Windows, the developing experience on Windows is > basically horrible (when compared to Linux/Mac). We're aware of this and would like to make more improvements here. > We're already making > people install MSVS to get the relevant Windows SDKs (manually, not > supported via ./mach bootstrap, and hopefully ticking the right boxes in > the installer or they have to do it again until they do win at > checkbox-golfing), and now we're telling them that although we just made > them download multiple gigs of stuff and install a pile of MS C++ > compiler infrastructure on their machine, we can't actually use that and > they need to download *another* C++ compiler to actually build/debug > Firefox? That seems pretty terrible in terms of getting/encouraging > contributions from people that don't work on Firefox fulltime. I brought this up in discussions because I agree that it feels bad to require installing a compiler that we're not going to use. Unfortunately we don't have a good alternative AFAIK. We might be able to install the Windows SDK separately via `mach bootstrap` (if Microsoft distributes some sort of standalone installer or package for it) but we will continue to require the MSVC standard library headers and import libraries so we can build Firefox against Microsoft's CRT. Microsoft does not distribute those outside of the MSVC installer. The only alternative we would have would be to use mingw-w64 and I don't know if that would be suitable for our shipped binaries. -Ted _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
