A portable Version of Rust Compiler for Windows

[JamilH]

Hi,

It would be great if there was a portable version of rust compiler for windows. I am asking for this becuase the installer requires admin rights to be installed. Here in my Uni, I dont have those rights. Secondly even with admin right, I had issues on my PC because of missing DLLs, most probably becuase of MinW dependence. Maybe it is too much to ask but it would be a great time saver.

[graydon]

This is not possible in the near term since we rely on a system linker (and will, when we're using the visual studio linker, depend on theirs). In the longer term it might be possible when we have transitioned to a new compiler driver based on clang and possibly clang's linker (which the LLVM people are working on). Not sure what the time horizon on that is.

See also #1768, #2238

[LeDominik]

After having quite some fun installing in Windows (already had 3 different MinGW Versions running) perhaps a possible solution would be to bundle the required MinGW stuff directly with rust binary installer, just like Haskell Platforms "batteries included". Combined with the new rust launcher #2238 (which could be the only thing on the windows path) this would be quite elegant...

Does that make sense or is it not feasible/helpful?

[thestinger]

I don't think the well covered milestone makes sense for this. It's just about making installation more convenient.

[catamorphism]

Visiting for bug triage. I don't think this is a blocker.

[vadimcn]

@brson, @alexcrichton: Maybe it's time to start invoking ld directly, at least on Windows?
Then we could bundle ld (and whatever else is needed from binutils) into the distribution package and stop depending on mingw environment.

cc #9367

[alexcrichton]

I would be wary about bundling system linkers because I would imagine that they have a very large array of dependencies which are always a moving target to pin down. We could in theory bundle a linker for just windows, which initially seems odd to me, but considering how our entire windows situation is a little odd (having a system requirement unlike other OSes) maybe it isn't that odd after all.

I personally do not know how much we depend on mingw, but I would be very surprised if our actual only dependency was on the system linker. It seems like we could have easily leaked in dependencies over time without knowing it, and I'm also unsure of how you'd figure this out (other than just building with something other than mingw and seeing what happens).

I suppose all in all, I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough to say yea or nea as to whether we should be doing this at this time. Some things that I'd be worried about would be bundling too many dependencies (maybe ok for windows?) and preventing mingw dependencies from leaking into rust in the future. I'd also want to know that someone has a clear understanding of the path forward on windows away from mingw in the long term (I'm not sure if one exists today).

[vadimcn]

Yes, I am talking about Windows only. Unix-ish platforms can be expected to have binutils installed, but on WIndows it is traditional that compilers carry all the stuff they need.
Aside from the linker, there's of course a bunch of mingw libraries which implement various bits of C runtime. Starting with libgcc dll. Some of that can probably be eliminated, maybe even all of it.

But, in general, I assume we do want to have Rust distribution independent of MinGW?

[alexcrichton]

We do eventually not want to require mingw, but I don't think the answer is to bundle all of mingw that we need. When we say we want to drop the mingw dep, at least in my mind, I think we're saying that we want to be buildable/bootstrappable in multiple environments other than MinGW. This means we should have logic/snapshots for msvc and friends, not just make it so our mingw version runs everywhere.

[retep998]

Considering Clang can compile object files that are linkable using MSVC's linker, it is definitely within the realm of possibility for Rust to use MSVC's linker as well.

[thestinger]

Rust can't ever redistribute the MSVC linker. It's a dead end.