798949 - SpiderMonkey does not compile under MinGW

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[rgrocottbugzilla]

The latest standalone SpiderMonkey release (1.8.5) is more-or-less impossible to build using MinGW and MSYS. The following blog post (not written by me, but I experienced similar issues) lists the bugs which have to be worked around:

http://opensourcepack.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/spidermonkey-185-mingw.html

The blog post does supply MinGW binaries for download (which I'm currently using), but it also mentions that they fail the testsuite, and a mozjs dll is not included. Being able to build the library independently would be a great improvement.

On a related note, the latest standalone SpiderMonkey sources are around 18 months old. Releases seem to occur every two years or so, between which the only way to access newer features is to download, and wrestle with, the entire mozilla-central package. Is there any way that SpiderMonkey releases could be automated, or otherwise made more regular?

Comment 1

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

The short answer is it'd be nice, but on Mozilla's side there's not too much demand for it, and SpiderMonkey hackers really don't know much about the packaging or library use problem spaces (so if we put something out there, we really wouldn't know if it actually solved people's problems or not, or if any solutions were the right way or the wrong way).  I'd love to see us release more regularly -- I think coincident with Firefox ESR releases makes sense -- but there's somewhat of a lack of knowledgeable people to drive the process.

There's been some discussion of this in various other bugs requesting a new source release, and in the newsgroup.  dmandelin just started up a thread a day or two ago in the JSAPI newsgroup -- mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine -- about making this simpler: landing the patches needed to do a SpiderMonkey release that aren't in the tree already, automating the packaging-up process, and so on.  Your thoughts there might be helpful, since obviously you have some, er, concerns about the current process (or lack thereof).  :-)

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine

Comment 2

[Jacek Caban]

FWIW the compilation on mingw can be done not only for SpiderMonkey, but for whole Firefox as well. I didn't experiment much with building on Windows, but current mozilla-central sources can be easily cross compiled on Linux, see [1] for instructions. It requires recent mingw-w64 trunk (for both 32 and 64-bit compilation), plain mingw is way too broken for this.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Cross_Compile_Mozilla_for_Mingw32

Comment 4

[rgrocottbugzilla]

So the issue is with MinGW, not Spidermonkey? Dang. Thanks for the info, though.

I think I'll see whether Spidermonkey compiles using MinGW-w64 (under Windows, rather than Linux), then report back. It's about time I migrated to a toolchain that's actually being maintained.

Comment 5

[Mihai Dobrescu]

Many years after... I need to bind SpiderMonkey to some other application compiled with mingw 64.
The simple build under msvc doesn't help me because generated libs by msvc are binary incompatible.
Any progress?