Re: Building on Windows for both 32 and 64-bit installs

On Thursday, February 20, 2014 4:39:21 PM UTC-6, Tony Mechelynck wrote:
>
> What about building 32-bit Vim executables, like Mozilla does for
>
> Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey? AFAIK, they run on both 32- and
>
> 64-bit Windows operating systems.

They do. I've been using 32-bit builds since I first got a 64-bit system a couple years back, and continued doing that when I started building on my own at work during Steve Hall's hiatus at the beginning of 7.4.

> Of course they cannot edit files
>
> longer than 2 GiB (per file) but I don't expect that to be much of a
>
> limitation.
>

The main limitation I have, that finally got me fed up enough to try building 64-bit, was that the "edit with Vim" context menu doesn't show up with the 32-bit Vim on 64-bit Windows. There are workarounds, including use of the "send to" menu and other things, but I just wanted it to work.

There are other issues, like some system tools (like chcp) not having 32-bit copies, again with workarounds (like adding the Sysnative directory to the path), but again: they're workarounds. I wanted something that "just works".

Now that I got it building, I think it launches a little faster now, too. I have nothing to back up that statement, though; it might be wishful thinking.

>
> If you're dead set on building more than one executable on the same
>
> machine with different config settings, you can of course set up more
>
> than one clone of Bram's source and start from there (before you do,
>
> check "hg help clone" and try to understand the hardlinking subtleties
>
> better than I do: you may or may not want to clone with --pull the
>
> second time); but IMHO that would be a little overdoing it.
>

This is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. For now I just have two separate .bat files. Each sets up the build environment, does "nmake clean", then builds and installs either the 32-bit or 64-bit version.

Now that Windows includes a mklink tool to create links, it should be possible to set up shadow directories like in the makefile for Unix-like systems. I'm just not certain of which files and folders need linking.

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