As you might expect, compiling rust crates that use C libraries can lead to the inscrutable-block-of-text linker errors we know and love. I have been having a rough time with CUDA, CMSIS-DSP, Tensorflow, and OpenCV during the past few weeks. One of them requires LLVM=v15 to be installed; another requires v16+. A diff one requires an old version of rustc to be installed. On a diff one, when I posted on Github, the maintainers assured me the crate is, in fact, fine, and my system is misconfigured; phew!
Lol, as a maintainer of a reasonably popular and complex -sys crate, our crate is “fine” on Windows, at least in theory, and I’ve heard of successes using it. However, I can’t even port my own app depending on said -sys crate to Windows; there’s always a wall of linker errors. If you report a Windows problem to me, I won’t tell you it’s fine, I just throw my hands in the air.
Out of curiosity is it a “Windows is objectively difficult” problem, or a “Windows is not Linux and I know Linux best” problem?
I’ve only begun using it so my expertise is limited, but I think vcpkg aims to help with some of these difficulties by shipping code as source and then running make on dependencies so they are guaranteed ABI compatible because the same compiler builds everything.
That I don’t know Windows well is certainly a factor, but I think it’s at most 40% of the problem. Several notable issues, not all:
- Competing msvc and gnu toolchains and ABIs, with native and Windows-first dependencies working better or exclusively with msvc, and *ix-first dependencies working better or exclusively with gnu, is a uniquely Windows situation. Which is which for a given build is also not clearly labeled most of the time. (You might mention glibc vs musl, but there’s basically nothing uniquely musl, and when you’re compiling for musl you can almost always get/compile everything for musl from the ground up.)
- Confusing coexistence of x86 and x64 is another thing largely unique to Windows. (amd64 and arm64 are much more clearly separated in Apple land.)
- Package management is a complete mess. Choco, scoop, win-get, nuget, vcpkg, ad hoc msi, ad hoc exe installer, ad hoc zip, etc. etc. There’s no pkg-config telling you where to look and which compiler flags to use. If you want to pick up a user-installed dep, you special case everything (e.g. looking in vcpkg path) and/or ask user to supply the search path(s) in env var(s).
Anyway, shit mostly(tm) just work(tm) on *ix if you follow the happy path. There’s no happy path on Windows more often than not.
