libcxx and clang-cl Visual Studio IDE integration

[void2012]

Hi! I would like to know how to use libcxx + clang-cl in Visual Studio 2022 IDE for Windows. Could someone write a guide or something on how to make it possible? Specifying your own VS directories and redirecting them to libcxx path doesn't work and breaks at random places. Thanks!

[philnik777]

libc++ doesn't have support for MSVC or EDG, so you can't use Visual Studio as an IDE with libc++. You can use VS Code (or any other editor with LSP support) with clangd if you want though.

[void2012]

libc++ doesn't have support for MSVC or EDG, so you can't use Visual Studio as an IDE with libc++. You can use VS Code (or any other editor with LSP support) with clangd if you want though.

Falsenuke. There IS support for both MinGW and MSVC environment. See for example: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/libcxx/include/__config

[void2012]

Lines like pragma comment(lib, "libc++.lib") hint that it's possible to build libc++ and use with clang-cl. Not to mention other MSVC-specific macro checks in that config file and other files too.

[philnik777]

libc++ supports building for MinGW and MSVC environments, but doesn't support Microsoft tools. You can only build libc++ with clang-cl in those environments.

[void2012]

I'm not talking about the Microsoft tools (as I don't ever ever use them for personal projects), I'm talking about using Clang-CL build tools, libc++ and Visual Studio IDE

[philnik777]

Visual Studio is a Microsoft tool. For it to work properly your standard library needs to support EDG, since that's what IntelliSense uses. We don't have support for EDG, so you can't use libc++ with Visual Studio.

[void2012]

What if I disable IntelliSense? It is too wasteful on resources. I guess clang-tidy and clangd are a better tool

[philnik777]

I guess you can do that, but I don't know why you'd use Visual Studio at that point. AFAICT you want to disable basically everything that it ships with. Anyways, there is a guide on how to build for MSVC here if that's all you want to do.

[void2012]

Uh not really. For example Visual Studio provides the best debugging experience on Windows.

[philnik777]

I'm pretty sure you give (at least parts of) that up as well, since there are no pretty printers for libc++'s containers in the visual studio debugger. It might mostly work, but I'm not sure you'll actually get what you want.