vcpkg

[henderkes]

I've switched most of my hobby projects over from pure cmake to cmake with the vcpkg integration. So far it has been a breeze.

I've had a look at it seems like most of our libraries could be built by vcpkg. This could potentially not only save us a lot of maintenance (vcpkg is very successful at guaranteeing build success) but also configuration.

This will take some research with linking against different libc/libc++'s though. Not a priority.

[henderkes]

https://github.com/gwdevhub/GWToolboxpp/pull/1257/files

Take a look at the amount of cmake configuration that just evaporated. Total vcpkg configuration is like 40 lines of code, 20 of which come from using a shared-library discord sdk in an otherwise static build.

[crazywhalecc]

It does look like a good approach. But it is different from our downloads and doctor at the moment, at least we separate downloading and building, and also this may require a huge PR or gradually replace the supporting libraries.

However, this is not our priority work, given that there are other issues to solve now. But I think windows should be a good start of this, because the default build components of many libraries on Windows do not support parallel builds. Also, I found vcpkg supports icu build, may be a good solution for #445 .

[henderkes]

I think vcpkg generally supports almost everything we need. The only thing I'm somewhat unsure about is its support to compile against different libc's.

[henderkes]

It supports it by specifying a cmake toolchain file to the triplet.

[henderkes]

Closing this because after toying around with it for a while, it seems that not all packages honour extra build flags. So the benefit of using our own compiler chain to be able to ensure everything is compiled with -fPIC -fPIE would vanish.

[crazywhalecc]

@henderkes If we only want to implement static icu build for windows, how do you think it is more appropriate to introduce it from vcpkg?

• Use independent CI to build the relevant *.lib and distribute it. SPC will directly use the pre-built and does not include the build file (simple modification, but violates the source code principle).
• Integrate vcpkg according to the previous PR (but if only this library is used, it does not seem to be a priority and kill the advantages of own toolchain).
• Rewrite the cmake of icu in vcpkg to spc (less cost, but requires manual maintenance and synchronization)

And btw if we choose 1 or 3, shall we close PR #676 ?

[henderkes]

Definitely number 2 of them, because it leaves the option to pass different flags later. I think vcpkg will help a lot on windows, especially if you aren't as familiar with it.

I've considered bringing forward windows support here and there, but it just doesn't make enough sense for me. Go doesn't support msvc so I'd never be able to get frankenphp running and on top of that, php is so unusably slow on windows due to the terrible file system.