Re: Issues while building ncurses 6.2 using Visual Studio

[Anonymous Maarten]

Hello Thomas,

Hello people of bug-ncurses,

I've updated my patches at https://github.com/mirror/ncurses/pull/1 on top of master.

These patches now let ncurses build using visual studio and using the ncurses build system.

CI output: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/madebr/ncurses/builds/31521971

I've done this in several steps:

• For the gcc-like compiles toolchain, I added an option to enable -fvisibility=hidden.
  Hiding symbols by default and only declaring certain symbols public, is the same principle as using __declspec(dllexport)/__declspec(dllimport) for dll's.
• I've added a ncurses_exports.h(.in) file that will declare these attributes:
• __declspec(dllexport)/__declspec(dllimport) for windows (msvc and mingw)
• __attribute__((visibility("default"))) for others
• I let each ncurses sublibrary handle its own import/exporting:
• each library gets a preprocessor define (BUILDING_NCURSES/BUILDING_FORM/BUILDING_MENU/...)
• Conditional on the presence of the define above, it will import/export a symbol
• I've improved the autoconf build script support for msvc:
• static libraries need to created as lib -out:name.lib object1.obj object2.obj
  Without the -out, is doesn't work
  So it creates a mk_static_lib.sh helper script, as is done for shared libraries.
• I've modified the file so that the default prefix for msvc builds is the empty string. Libraries built by msvc do not have a lib prefix.
• I've done the same so that the suffix of static libraries is .lib instead of .a.
  

Apart from the changes to the build system, there were 2 changes rqeuired to ncurses/base/MKlib_gen.sh. When the macro is expanded, too many parentheses are generated and an error is thrown.

> The NOMACROS change will cause the library to not work...

Also, I've (again) defined NCURSES_NOMACROS.

As you wrote as a comment on my pr on github, this is a bug.

But without this change, the following code is created after preprocessing:

    spec(dllexport) int __cdecl
    waddchnstr(stdscr,(const chtype * z),-1)
    {
     ;
      return waddchnstr(stdscr,(z),-1);
    }
   
    __declspec(dllexport) int __cdecl
    waddnstr(stdscr,(const char * a1),(int z))
    {
      ;
      return waddnstr(stdscr,(a1),(z));
    }
   
    __declspec(dllexport) int __cdecl
    waddnstr(stdscr,(const char * z),-1)
    {
      ;
      return waddnstr(stdscr,(z),-1);
    }

As you can see, the argument of the functions is not correct.

I hope you can do something with my patches.

Best regards

Maarten