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Comment by dancsi | Hacker News Reader

You can download a nice installer from here: http://llvm.org/releases/download.html

Yes but that installer doesn't actually install a fully working environment, you need the standard library from MinGW or MSVC as well.

That's unlikely to change any time soon, at least from the LLVM side. They're not really in the business of providing OS API headers. At least there's a Windows SDK download now that is smaller than the whole Visual Studio IDE, and the MinGW-w64 project is working on making fully LLVM-based toolchains more usable over time.

It would be nice if they could at least keep the documentation up to date on which MinGW-W64 builds work and which don't etc. I just don't have the time to muck around with things when I can just grab a MinGW build and it "just works" out of the box.

With how friendly Microsoft are getting with Clang I was hoping we might see a LLVM+MSVCHeaders build appear. I am sure it is possible considering the new MS.

I know I am lazy in wanting a one-click solution but my build environment is very important to me. I don't want to have to hack it together using blog posts from 6 months ago that might or might not give me a stable setup. I don't think it is too much to ask for something like TDM's GCC installer.

You might like Clang with Microsoft CodeGen[1], a work in progress by Microsoft to add a Clang toolset to Visual Studio 2015 that uses the MSVC backend.

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/04/clang-wit...

Yeah I have been following the Clang\C2 work. I guess that is what the LLVM project would rather work with Microsoft towards rather than rolling their own. It will certainly make life easier for cross-platform C++ to use Clang/C2 over C1/C2. Having to install Visual Studio to get it is a bit annoying though, I would prefer to fire up a VM with just Clang and the MSVC/Windows headers to command line compile. Visual Studio is a big install inside a VM which is annoying.

I quick question you may know the answer to, does the Windows SDK not come with the Windows C++ headers anymore? I installed the Windows 10 1511 SDK the other day but even a full install didn't give me any of the stdlib which I thought it would do? I understand they removed the compilers but I thought the headers still came with it?

Oh, bummer, I even thought the Windows SDK still had the command-line compilers. What's it good for then?

Most open-source projects don't even bother supporting MSVC, and I don't blame them one bit. MinGW-w64 gives a significantly less painful route to Windows support, and allows you to pretend MSVC doesn't exist in a lot of cases.

I am trying to work out what use the Windows SDK is without Visual Studio (which also includes the Windows SDK!).

What benefit does that really have over just using Clang with LLVM codegen though?

What really confused me was that from the llvm front page, if you click Win Installer, you get a version that seems to expect MSVC headers, while if you click LLVM 3.8.0 you get the page you are linking, where the installers appear to expect MinGW headers.

Or perhaps there is some option in both of them to select the other?

It seems that the target option might be the one I was looking for.

The installed version defaults to x86_64-pc-windows-msvc, where the msvc at the end suggests it is looking for MSVC headers.

If you specify x86_64-w64-mingw32 as target, it uses the mingw-w64 headers.

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