On 17.10.2013 10:41, Manu wrote:
On 17 October 2013 17:08, Rainer Schuetze <r.sagita...@gmx.de
<mailto:r.sagita...@gmx.de>> wrote:
On 16.10.2013 13:13, Manu wrote:
It seems the installer failed to replace two occurences of
%WindowsSdkDir%. WindowsSdkDir is set by batch files
vsvars32..bat
and friends. I see conflicting goals here:
1. the installer expands variables WindowsSdkDir and
VCINSTALLDIR in
sc.ini to work without running vsvars32.bat. It has to make
decisions on what versions to pick up.
2. when running dmd by Visual D you want to select settings
according to the current Visual Studio, which means it
needs the
unexpanded variables.
The current option to allow both is to not run the linker
through
dmd, but invoke it "manually".
What do you mean by 'manually' exactly?
Is there anything that can be done in VisualD to override these
variables when invoking the compiler?
By "manually" I mean that the linker is not run through dmd, but is
called directly from the batch generated by Visual D. This means,
Visual D has to extract all the settings from sc.ini and rebuild the
command line that dmd would generate. In addition, it needs to know
which settings have to be replaced and which have been set
deliberately by the user.
Hmmm, I tend to think that sc.ini should be ignored/overridden entirely
under VisualD.
Visual Studio has all its own places to configure paths and options.
Anyone who runs more than one version of Visual Studio has to
micro-manage sc.ini, which is really annoying.
As a VisualD user, I expect to be able to access all settings and paths
in Visual Studio, and they should be relevant for the version of Visual
Studio in use.
At least that's my take on it, from an end-user perspective.
Makes sense, though I'm unsure how to stop dmd from interpreting sc.ini.
Adding an empty sc.ini into the project folder could work, but is a bit
ugly.
On a side note, Visual Studio tends to maintain it's default settings in
property sheets (you can access the x64 defaults under
Microsoft.Cpp.x64.user under the Property Manager). I wonder if VisualD
should also store defaults in the same place, but then I noticed that
VisualD project's don't seem to have any presence in the Property
Manager... I guess it's a special project type, and therefore subvert's
MSBuild? I don't really know how all that stuff fits together.
When I started work on Visual D, VS2008 was the current version and it
did not use msbuild for C++ (IIRC only for C#). There was no good reason
to build on top of msbuild.
Even with VS2010, I don't like msbuild. I think msbuild has good
dependency handling, see the Intel Compiler integration which is
horrible. My impression is that MS subverts msbuild for C++ to make it
acceptable.
You know, thinking on it, it's kinda strange in a sense that D should
have completely distinct library paths at all. It might be useful in
VisualD to add all the C/C++ x64 library paths as standard link paths
aswell.
Surely it's reasonable as a Visual Studio end-user to assume that any
libs available to C/C++ should also be available to D too? These are
'system libs' after all. At least, they've been registered with VS as if
they are.
I tend to agree. I'll see if I can find the C++ settings somewhere, so I
can add a switch to add the library paths automatically.
I think we'll need different global settings for Win32 and Win64, too.
There's one other detail that I forgot in my prior email; I think it
would be really handy to include the DirectX lib path by default.
It's a very standard MS lib package, and anyone who does multimedia
development will surely have it on their system, and require it
to be
hooked up.
My DX libs are here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft DirectX
SDK (June
2010)\Lib\x64
It seems I have an environment variable: DXSDK_DIR=C:\Program Files
(x86)\Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010)\
It also seems to register a presence in the registry at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\__Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DirectX\__Microsoft
DirectX SDK (June 2010)\InstallPath
I usually have more faith in the registry, but the env variable is
surely going to be present on everyone's machine.
I'm not sure we should add too many special cases, everybody has his
own set of favorite libraries (I haven't touched DirectX for more
than 10 years). Considering that you probably have to make your own
imports for the respective declarations, I think it is ok to add an
appropriate library path to your project aswell.
It seems the DX-SDK does not end up in the LIB environment variable
for the VS command prompt aswell, though I see it added in the
Visual Studio settings.
I only suggest the DXSDK lib in particular for a few reasons:
1. It's a really standard Microsoft lib, not just some 3rd party thing.
2. Being a Microsoft lib, it integrates into Visual Studio
automatically when installed, and it's necessary to do basically any
multimedia in windows.
3. It's been integrated into the Windows 8 SDK from VS2012 and on
(that's why the stand-alone package is quite old), but for the sake of
'it just works', for prior versions of Visual Studio (which we do
support), the path needs to be added.
Ie, there's a risk of VS2012 users saying "well it works for me!", but
the VS2010 users complaining that it doesn't seem to work for them, and
then scratching heads why it works for some but not others.
With the option to include C++ libraries, the DX-SDK libraries will be
found, too. At least from within Visual D...
