[question] combine msvcrt and ucrt in single pkg?

[waltje]

Awesome new release. I also grabbed the armv7 ones, just to play with it on my Surface tablets and let them do native compiles :p

Anyway- would be it possible to 'merge' the msvcrt and ucrt systems into a single package, with just separate directories for the runtimes, defaulting to ucrt ?

[mstorsjo]

I guess it could be possible, but it'd require some amount of fiddling with the build scripts, making the whole build setup more complicated (while it now is simpler when each build more or less exists in its own universe). The other question is how to use it conveniently (without forcing the user to do something like -L<path-to-toolchain>/<arch>-w64-mingw32/lib/msvcrt when using it.

There's a minor difference between the tools themselves between the ucrt and msvcrt builds now too - the toolchain itself is linked against the same CRT as it uses as default.

AFAIK Clang does have some "multilib" functionality which might be useful for that, but it'd require adding custom multilib configurations in the clang mingw frontend driver.

So all in all, plausible, but would require some amount of work. As (I think) the general consensus is that UCRT is the way forward and msvcrt configurations are kept as a legacy option, I'm not sure if it's the top priority to spend a lot of effort on right now.

[waltje]

True, although I didnt realize you also linked the binaries to the (same) crt.

Personally, I would add a new "-crt=xxxx" option to allow selecting the desired crt (similar to the -stdlib= option) with ucrt being the default. Or, rather, the one that we linked against is the default.

This still requires two sets of binaries, but allows you to select the target runtime during a compile. Over time, the msvcrt binary set can be dropped, while still included in the distro as a 'selectable'.

(PS: even win7 and win8x can run ucrt, it would be mostly for <= vista)