Building Chrome on Windows 7

[Bruce Dawson]

The Chromium developer documentation currently says that Windows 7 is sufficient for building Chromium. Given that Windows 7 is five months past end-of-life I think that this is something that we should no longer support.

Does anybody out there need to build Chromium on Windows 7?

To make it perfectly clear, this question is purely about building Chromium, not about running it.

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Bruce Dawson

[Bruce Dawson]

As long as we're discussing build requirements... 

The Chromium build instructions for Windows say that VS 2017 or 2019 is supported, and Windows 7 and above. Supporting this wide a range of environments is problematic.

I think we should raise the minimum OS requirement to at least Windows 8.1, and perhaps Windows 10 (released five years ago).

I think we should raise the minimum VS requirement to VS 2019.

Thoughts?

--

Bruce Dawson

[Dirk Pranke]

Requiring Win10 seems reasonable to me, I don't know how feasible it is these days to build Chrome on a machine that you wouldn't have already upgraded to Win10 on if you were a developer. 

But, I would like to hear from others who might be doing so if they are out there :).

When you talk about VS version support, is that just for supporting it as an IDE?

-- Dirk

[Bruce Dawson]

The VS version support refers to the fact that in order to build Chromium you either need a downloadable toolchain (available to Google employees and some other companies that have configured the equivalent) or you need a local install of Visual Studio and the Windows 10 SDK. Even though we don't build with the VC++ compiler we still use some of the tools, headers, and libraries that come with a VC++/Visual Studio install and we currently support both VS 2017 and VS 2019.

I just sent a separate email where I raise the likelihood of soon requiring the most recent Windows 10 SDK - that requirement will probably land before a Windows 10 or VS 2019 requirement.

--

Bruce Dawson

[Dirk Pranke]

Okay, thanks. 

I have no strong leaning on the VS SDKs and toolchains, and would be curious to hear if anyone still really needs 2017 and can't upgrade. I don't know how their pricing works these days to know if that's an issue, for example.

-- Dirk

[dragon788]

Building shouldn't necessarily require an installation/licensing of the VisualStudio IDE as there are VisualStudio Build Tools packages available via the VisualStudio installer that are designed for CI systems or other cases where you want to build or run tests without needing a full IDE with code completion etc.

Technically even installing VS 2017 or the VC/VC++ components from 2017 or earlier versions of the .NET framework uses the latest VisualStudio installer (which is used for both IDE and/or BuildTools and other components like the Windows SDKs).

The biggest thing to watch out for is the IDE (paid or community edition) installs to a different path than the Build Tools, so if you hard code any paths you'd likely want to add an additional location to search for those components.