Writing code that builds with multiple compilers is good way to catch errors, improve code quality and conformance. Or so I have always been taught. Hence, when we ported Krita to Windows, we ported it to the native compiler for Windows, Microsoft Visual C++. That took some doing, but in the process we found lots of little things that, once fixed, improved Krita’s code. When we ported Krita to OSX, where the native compiler is clang, the same happened.
And then we added two dependencies to Krita that have trouble with Visual C++: G’Mic and Vc. G’Mic implements a parser for a custom scripting language for writing filters, and that parser is written in a way that makes life really hard for Visual C++. Basically, the 32 bits builds never worked and the 64 bits builds need a stack of about a gigabyte to parse the scripts. And Vc, a library to add vectorization/simd support easily, from version 1.0 and up just doesn’t build at all on Windows.
It’s probably not a coincidence that both are heavy users of templates, and in the case of Vc, of C++11. But Krita needs both libraries: our users love all the filters and tools the G’Mic plugin gives them, and without Vc, our brushes and pixel compositing code becomes really slow.
What could we do? Hair was liberally pulled and not a few not unmanly tears shed. We could try to build Krita on Windows using one of the GCC ports, or we could try to build Krita on Windows using clang. We already tried to use Intel’s icc to build Krita, but that broke already when trying to build Qt. (Though that was in the early Qt 4 days, so maybe things are better now.)
But building on Windows will always be slower, because of the slow terminal and the slow file system, and we know that the Windows releases of Gimp and LibreOffice are actually built on Linux. Cross-compiled for Windows. If complex projects like those can manage, we should be able to manage too.
Unfortunately, I’m a bear^Wdeveloper of very little brain, and figuring out which blogs and articles are up to date and relevant for OpenSUSE Leap was already quite hard, and when I saw that the mingw packages for Leap were a year old, I wasn’t prepared to even put a lot of time into that.
Enter MXE. It’s a kind of KDE’s emerge, but for Linux, a bunch of Makefiles that can make a cross-platform build. It comes with a huge bunch of pre-configured libraries, though Unfortunately not everything we need.
So, using MXE, I built Qt and most dependencies. Still missing are Vc, OpenColorIO, GSL, Poppler-qt5 and openjpeg. I also needed to remove some of the hacks we did to make Krita compile with MSVC: we had added a couple of dummy header files to provide things like nothl and friends (these days superseded by QtEndian). A 3rd-party library we embed, xcftools, had its own equivalent of that stuff. But apart from that…
Everything mostly built out of the box, and the result runs in Wine (as evidenced by the “native” file dialog:
What’s left to do? Build the remaining dependencies, add translations, create a packaging script (where’s windeployqt?), and test.