kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/12/2018 1:24 PM, Tomasz Wlostowski wrote:
> On 12/03/18 17:36, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>> No doubt I'm out of touch. :)  It's been at least 10 years since I used
>> msvs.  It's great that they have decided to support open source
>> development tools. 
> 
> Hi Wayne,
> 
> I hadn't used MSVC for a while until a few months ago where I had to
> develop a small program for Windows. It was quite a positive change
> since the previous time (also ~10 years ago). I appreciate the nice dark
> coloured theme and greatly improved autocompletion/class browser.
> 
> Honestly, I don't care if MSVS supports Mingw or other non-MS toolchain
> or debugger. What I care about is a compiler that doesn't take ages to
> compile Kicad (for some reason MSYS's gcc is ~3 times slower than gcc
> under Linux). Same applies to CMake and a debugger that works under Windows:
> - In my case GDB and LLDB require some strange hacks (a separate
> program) to send a ctrl-c to interrupt the application being debugged.
> This hasn't been fixed since 2009 (see [1]) - so apparently nobody cares
> to make GDB a working thing under Windows.
> - Qt Creator crashes when I try to attach to running kicad process.
> - Converting DWARF-2 symbols to MS PDB format (in order to use MSVS
> debugger) using cv2pdb tool fails. Maybe due to debug symbols taking ~1
> GB in _pcbnew.kiface alone. I also can't understand why the debug info
> takes more than 100 times the size of the source code ;-).
> - IDA Pro in free version doesn't support debugging...
> 
> Since we often do favors for our Linux users (e.g. by adding workarounds
> for poor quality Linux graphics drivers), we should also be more
> welcoming to the Windows users (and programmers) - it's only 70-80% of
> our user base IIRC. Vast majority of Windows developers use MSVS. If we
> want them onboard, we must support MSVS. I'm pretty sure there are
> people willing to help with this on the mailing list.
> 
> Tom
> 
> [1]
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/711086/in-gdb-on-mingw-how-to-make-ctrl-c-stop-the-program
> 

As long as we don't have to add msvs specific fixes to the kicad source
then I don't have any issues with this but I think this falls under the
category be careful what you wish for.  The context switching build
issue will most likely have to be fixed yet again if we choose to go
down this path.  I do not believe current context assembly files will
build with msvc so we will either have to provide both sets of assembly
files or go back to using them from the boost which has it's own set of
well known build issues.