[Rd] Seeking advice regarding compilation of large libraries using RTools (Windows)

[Richard Beare]

Hello,

I am working on the SimpleITK package for R. This is an enormous package
that is largely automatically generated via a set of swig/json/lua magic,
and is working well under linux and osx. However we're having a lot of
trouble with the Windows side. In fact, we are struggling to get the base
libraries to build using the RTools 3.4 toolchain, even before the worrying
about the R-specific parts.

I'm hoping someone has observed and solved this problem.

The current issue is very long time (possibly infinite) linking of dlls, or
test executables. I've tried using a FAT32 file system for the build, as
suggested by some old bug reports, but still have the issue.

The build system is CMake-based, and we have the same issues with either
unix makefiles or ninja. The current build host is windows 2012 server, but
we've had the same problems on windows 7 and 10.

We're using the -Wa -mbig-obj flags.

One of the problem commands looks like this:

cd D:/B/SimpleITK-build/Code/Explicit/src && C:/Rtools/mingw_64/bin/g++.exe
-Wno-long-long -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-strict-overflow -Wextra
-Wformat=2 -Wno-format-nonliteral -Wunused -Wpointer-arith -Winvalid-pch
-Wcast-align -Wdisabled-optimization -Woverloaded-virtual -Wshadow
-Wwrite-strings -Wstrict-null-sentinel -Wno-invalid-offsetof  -Wa,-mbig-obj
-Wa,-mbig-obj  -mthreads   -mthreads -O3 -DNDEBUG   -mthreads   -mthreads
-shared -o ../../../bin/libSimpleITKExplicit-1.0.dll
-Wl,--out-implib,../../../lib/libSimpleITKExplicit-1.0.dll.a
-Wl,--major-image-version,1,--minor-image-version,0 -Wl,--whole-archive
CMakeFiles/SimpleITKExplicit.dir/objects.a -Wl,--no-whole-archive
@CMakeFiles/SimpleITKExplicit.dir/linklibs.rsp


As a guide, the final shared library is 259M on linux. The windows build
doesn't appear to be memory limited - the ld process is using about 1.5G
and consuming 1 core, but doesn't complete given an entire day.

Any suggestions on where to turn next? Are cross compilers the next step?

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