[webkit-dev] Proposal: Dropping MSVC support and use clang-cl exclusively on Windows

[Fujii Hironori]

On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 5:28 AM Herb Sutter via webkit-dev <
webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org> wrote:

> One followup: I don’t know WebKit well but was surprised that it was being
> built with MSVC, and Yusuke mentioned Windows projects that build with
> clang-cl instead. Are there known users/products who are building with
> WebKit that are important not to break, so that we (Microsoft) should be
> thinking about doing work so you can keep using MSVC, or is this really an
> unused configuration that it makes sense to just drop?
>

As far as I know, projects publicly distributing Windows WebKit and
JavaScriptCore are only Microsoft Playwright and Bun.
As Yusuke mentioned, they already switched to clang-cl.

> 4. Major third-parties using Windows WebKit (e.g. Bun.js, praywright
etc.) are using clang-cl, not MSVC.

Other browser engines, Chrome and Firefox, already switched to Clang. You
might be interested in their blogs.

Clang is now used to build Chrome for Windows - The LLVM Project Blog
https://blog.llvm.org/2018/03/clang-is-now-used-to-build-chrome-for.html

Building Firefox on Windows with clang-cl | Home Page
https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2014-06-26/building-firefox-on-windows-with-clang-cl/

an unexpected benefit of standardizing on clang-cl | Nathan's Blog
https://blog.mozilla.org/nfroyd/2019/04/25/an-unexpected-benefit-of-standardizing-on-clang-cl/

For someone worrying about compiler monoculture, it seems that some
QtWebKit users are using GCC (MinGW) on Windows.
https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/issues/1102
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