Coil Toolchain for Windows

Nix-based toolchain for Windows builds. Uses Coil Toolchain MSVS project for MSVS support.

Currently the MSVC integration uses clang-cl compiler instead of usual cl.

Example usage

The following example builds Windows version of SDL2. WARNING: the initial build is very heavy: it will run multiple QEMU VMs and take many GiBs of space. Subsequent builds will reuse Nix cache and run much faster.

It is easier to use the umbrella default.nix from the root Coil project instead of using this project directly. Clone the Coil project, and run the following (while being in the Coil project directory):

# MSVS compilers are unfree, and nixpkgs requires explicit okay
export NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1
# perform build
nix build -L --impure --expr 'let
  pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
  coil = import ./default.nix {}; # import Coil project
  inherit (coil.toolchain-windows.msvc {}) mkCmakePkg;
in mkCmakePkg {
  inherit (pkgs.SDL2) pname version src meta; # just use source from nixpkgs
  cmakeFlags = [
    "-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON"
  ];
}'

Credits

This uses multiple third-party projects:

• Packer - the tool for VM provisioning
• QEMU - for VMs on Linux
• Wine - for running Windows binaries on Linux
• chef/bento - for maintained Windows autounattend scripts
• VirtIO-Win signed driver binaries by Fedora project

Inspiration and bits and pieces from:

• WFVM
• StefanScherer/packer-windows