Does anyone still use MSVC?

Lei Zhang

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Feb 12, 2020, 2:58:05 PM2/12/20

to pdfium

Chromium just announced "MSVC is now officially unsupported" [1].
PDFium borrows most of its build infrastructure with Chromium, so this
is a good time to ask everyone here if they still use MSVC as their
compiler for PDFium.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/topic/chromium-dev/fuVUxe1q6EA/discussion

Roman Wueger

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Feb 12, 2020, 4:29:11 PM2/12/20

to Lei Zhang, pdfium

Yes, I use VS2015 to VS2029 for various projects.

Best Regards
Roman

> Am 12.02.2020 um 20:58 schrieb Lei Zhang <the...@chromium.org>:
>
> Chromium just announced "MSVC is now officially unsupported" [1].

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pdfium" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pdfium+un...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pdfium/CACSHbcRbhxc7YrQpiQgPt5Sxv0kD1Bcfp_edDGii7JKochTDgw%40mail.gmail.com.

Jeffery

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Feb 12, 2020, 6:16:54 PM2/12/20

to pdfium

I’m using vs2017 for the pdfium library

K. Moon

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Feb 12, 2020, 8:34:38 PM2/12/20

to Lei Zhang, pdfium

Note that this announcement is about using MSVC as a compiler, not as an IDE. If you use MSVC with clang-cl, I assume you're fine, but I don't use MSVC, so I'm not sure how well that works...

Lei Zhang

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Feb 13, 2020, 1:08:43 AM2/13/20

to pdfium

Thanks everyone for the feedback. From the replies I received, public
and private, it looks like the answer is yes.

Next question: Is switching to Clang an option? Note that "Clang" does
not necessarily have to be the pre-built one that lives in
third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/. If not, why not?

PDFium currently has continuous testing on Windows with MSVC. There
are no current plans to drop MSVC support, but the cost for supporting
MSVC may increase in the future. Given this, I figured this is a good
time to ask the community these questions.

Roman Wueger

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Feb 13, 2020, 1:37:35 AM2/13/20

to Lei Zhang, pdfium

No we can‘t use clang at the moment. Every project I know is setup with the default msvc compiler and we use also MFC for some projects too.

Regards

> Am 13.02.2020 um 07:08 schrieb Lei Zhang <the...@chromium.org>:
>
> Thanks everyone for the feedback. From the replies I received, public

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pdfium/CACSHbcQGLjUMEPDW1VMLfEpq-5OeF74mHfmJzJOHAxJn0EOM%2BQ%40mail.gmail.com.

Miklos Vajna

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Feb 13, 2020, 3:19:23 AM2/13/20

to Lei Zhang, pdfium

Hi Lei,

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 11:57:52AM -0800, Lei Zhang <the...@chromium.org> wrote:
> Chromium just announced "MSVC is now officially unsupported" [1].
> PDFium borrows most of its build infrastructure with Chromium, so this
> is a good time to ask everyone here if they still use MSVC as their
> compiler for PDFium.

Yes, LibreOffice still uses VS2017 to build on Windows. (Though when
building unofficial binaries, clang-cl can be configured as an option.)

So far bundling pdfium with this setup worked nicely, so not breaking
MSVC intentionally is much appreciated. :-) (Or at least accepting
patches to fix that.)

Thanks,

Miklos

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Vincent Torri

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Feb 13, 2020, 3:32:48 AM2/13/20

to Lei Zhang, pdfium

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 7:08 AM Lei Zhang <the...@chromium.org> wrote:
>
> Thanks everyone for the feedback. From the replies I received, public
> and private, it looks like the answer is yes.
>
> Next question: Is switching to Clang an option?

just a note : about gcc vs clang on Windows, i would like to say that
clang can save debug informations also in pdb format, not dwarf only.
So Microsoft debugging tools can be used

Vincent Torri

>Note that "Clang" does
> not necessarily have to be the pre-built one that lives in
> third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/. If not, why not?
>
> PDFium currently has continuous testing on Windows with MSVC. There
> are no current plans to drop MSVC support, but the cost for supporting
> MSVC may increase in the future. Given this, I figured this is a good
> time to ask the community these questions.
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 1:29 PM Roman Wueger <roman....@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Yes, I use VS2015 to VS2029 for various projects.
> >
> > Best Regards
> > Roman
> >
> > > Am 12.02.2020 um 20:58 schrieb Lei Zhang <the...@chromium.org>:
> > >
> > > Chromium just announced "MSVC is now officially unsupported" [1].
> > > PDFium borrows most of its build infrastructure with Chromium, so this
> > > is a good time to ask everyone here if they still use MSVC as their
> > > compiler for PDFium.
> > >
> > > [1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/topic/chromium-dev/fuVUxe1q6EA/discussion
> > >
> > > --
> > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pdfium" group.
> > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pdfium+un...@googlegroups.com.
> > > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pdfium/CACSHbcRbhxc7YrQpiQgPt5Sxv0kD1Bcfp_edDGii7JKochTDgw%40mail.gmail.com.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pdfium" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pdfium+un...@googlegroups.com.

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pdfium/CACSHbcQGLjUMEPDW1VMLfEpq-5OeF74mHfmJzJOHAxJn0EOM%2BQ%40mail.gmail.com.

Nico Weber

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Aug 2, 2022, 8:45:43 PM8/2/22

to pdfium

Hi,

would it work for you to build pdfium with clang-cl? Its output is supposed to be ABI-compatible with MSVC, so you should still be able to use VS2017 to build LibreOffice and link against a pdfium library built by clang-cl.

(The motivation is that a) we wouldn't have to keep pdfium itself buildable with msvc and b) we wouldn't have to make new dependencies we want to add to pdfium buildable with msvc just for pdfium's sake.)

Thanks,

Nico

Miklos Vajna

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Aug 3, 2022, 3:54:41 PM8/3/22

to Nico Weber, pdfium

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 02, 2022 at 05:45:43PM -0700, Nico Weber <tha...@chromium.org> wrote:
> would it work for you to build pdfium with clang-cl? Its output is supposed
> to be ABI-compatible with MSVC, so you should still be able to use VS2017
> to build LibreOffice and link against a pdfium library built by clang-cl.
>
> (The motivation is that a) we wouldn't have to keep pdfium itself buildable
> with msvc and b) we wouldn't have to make new dependencies we want to add
> to pdfium buildable with msvc just for pdfium's sake.)

Yes, that's an acceptable compromise. We already build skia with
clang-cl, not because we're super-happy about it, but the performance
difference is significant.

(We moved to VS2019 in the meantime, but I don't think that matter too
much.)

Please just let this list know if/when you drop msvc support, to avoid
bad surprises. :-)

Thanks,

Miklos

Nico Weber

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Jan 22, 2025, 11:23:03 AMJan 22

to Miklos Vajna, pdfium

The day has come: MSVC support is being removed from pdfium in https://crbug.com/389951208

(Depending on how you count, it already came last year, when v8 dropped MSVC support. pdfium has a dependency on v8, but I think it's maybe optional.)

Miklos Vajna

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Jan 24, 2025, 7:47:03 AMJan 24

to Nico Weber, pdfium

Hi Nico,

On Wed, Jan 22, 2025 at 11:22:46AM -0500, Nico Weber <tha...@chromium.org> wrote:
> The day has come: MSVC support is being removed from pdfium in
> https://crbug.com/389951208

Thanks for the heads-up. As you say the clang-cl transition direction
should not be too bad.

> (Depending on how you count, it already came last year, when v8 dropped
> MSVC support. pdfium has a dependency on v8, but I think it's maybe
> optional.)

The mentioned libreoffice use-case takes pdfium without v8, so yes, it's
optional.

Regards,

Miklos

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