[distcc] re: wrapmsvc.exe

[Dan Kegel]

"anonymous" <user.NO-SPAM at upf.es> wrote:
 > A MS-Visual C cl.exe wrapper using gcc syntax already exists from very
 > long time: wrapmsvc.exe exist inside Coin3D package. You can obtain the
 > binary/source code downloading the source of Coin library, or any of the
 > GUI bindings associated.
 >
 > Perhaps, with permission (from SIM), you can include the source code
 > inside distcc and support not only gcc syntax, but also cl.exe syntax.
 > ...
 > Source code of this nice program (GNU License) available at:
 > http://www.coin3d.org/source/cfg/Attic/wrapmsvc.cpp?rev=1.4&cvsroot=Coin-1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

I am interested in making it easy for people to run
Microsoft's C compiler on Linux.  This might come in
handy for people writing portable software who want to
verify that their software is indeed portable to Microsoft's compiler,
but who don't want to rewrite their Makefiles.

In fact, I have a shell script which transparantly runs
the free-download version of Microsoft's C compiler
on Linux using Wine.  It's quite convenient, except
for the fact that Microsoft's commandline options are
sooo different from gcc's.
So I was interested to hear about wrapmsvc.
It plus my shell script might well allow using distcc with
msvc.

I downloaded it and tried compiling it.  First thing I
noticed is that it seems to assume it's running on Windows.
At first I thought that meant it would have to be rewritten
a bit, but then I realized since it has to invoke cl.exe anyway,
which has to run under Wine, may as well just run wrapmsvc under Wine, too.

Second thing I noticed is it uses some Cygwin-only library functions,
so we might have to copy-and-paste the source for those
if we want to compile it with anything but cygwin's compiler.

Anyway, that's probably fairly easy, and I might try it sometime soon.

 > I like to use distcc with MSVC now!

I assume you mean you *would* like to use distcc with MSVC,
not that you are already using it.

Note: there is a commercial product called Incredibuild which already
can do parallel builds with msvc.  You can download a trial version from
http://www.xoreax.com
Developers I have worked with have used that and found it did speed
up compiles (but slowed down links - maybe that's been fixed).  But
I'm interested in a zero-cost option, and Incredibuild costs money.
- Dan

-- 
My technical stuff: http://kegel.com
My politics: see http://www.misleader.org for examples of why I'm for regime change