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

[Ray Donnelly]

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 8:21 PM, Richard Beare <richard.beare at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Yep - simpleITK is available at github.com/SimpleITK/SimpleITK. There's
> also github.com/SimpleITK/SimpleITKRInstaller - a devtools based installer
> for mac and linux.
>
> CMake has a range of build environments. I experimented with MSYS2 and
> mingw makefiles, but had trouble with incompatibilities in the path
> required by CMake and those options - from memory the sh in RTools/bin
> caused problems. Although it sounds like you are saying it is necessary to
> install the MSYS2 system as well.
>

MSYS2 has two variants (3 distinctly named packages) of CMake:
mingw-w64-{i686,x86_64}-cmake and cmake. Which of these (if any) did you
use? I cannot state without experimenting which should be used, but the
mingw-w64 prefixed ones are usually the ones you want to generate native
code.


>
> The unix makefile option for CMake appears to work well until the linking
> stage. Ninja has problems at a similar stage.
>
> I'll steer clear of dll's, as you suggest. I'm checking those links for
> compiler/links flags to see if we're missing anything
>

I would be happy to see if I can get it to compile in the Anaconda
Distribution too. Here we prefer DLLs. The gnu ld linker on Windows is very
slow and doesn't seem to scale too well. I do not expect cross-compiling
would make it much faster. The clang linker (ldd) is nearly viable on
Windows and apparently much faster. I'm not sure if this near-viability is
in relation to using it in msvc mode, gcc mode or both (or even whether it
implements frontends for both).


> Thanks
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Jeroen Ooms <jeroenooms at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 6:33 AM, Richard Beare <richard.beare at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > Is it available somewhere so we can try it?
> >
> >
> > > 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.
> >
> > What build environment do you use? The version of gcc with Rtools
> > should be ok, but the Rtools build utilities in the "bin" folder (in
> > particular 'make') are old and a frequent source of problems. However
> > for building external libs you can use other tools, for example those
> > from msys2. Just make sure you use gcc/g++ from Rtools.
>
>
> >
> > > 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.
> >
> > On Windows you can avoid the run-time dll mess by building static libs
> > of external libraries. See rwinlib for examples:
> > https://github.com/rwinlib
> >
> >
> > > Any suggestions on where to turn next? Are cross compilers the next
> step?
> >
> > Try building with msys2, but make sure to use gcc/g++ from Rtools by
> > setting the `CC` and `CXX` variables in the configure script. Cross
> > compiling will make things even more complicated because binaries
> > might not be compatible if your cross compiler has a different version
> > of gcc or has been configured for another exception model (seh/drawf).
> >
>
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