floooh
commented
1 month ago Just a couple of tidbits before I'll get around to actually try the result on Windows:
Slightly different scenario (a Zig+sokol project with a build.zig), but in the pacman.zig project (https://github.com/floooh/pacman.zig), I can compile a Windows exe on macOS with:
zig build -Dtarget=x86_64-windows
This will link the following Windows DLLs:
Also, I think this uses MUSL instead of the MSVC C library (e.g. it shouldn't require the ucrtbase.dll at runtime). I did not yet actually try running this executable on Windows, but I will check this later (not today though).
For a C application compiled with Zig I can imagine that there will be problems with main() vs WinMain() entry points (sokol_app.h uses WinMain on Windows, unless SOKOL_WIN32_FORCE_MAIN or SOKOL_NO_ENTRY is defined). sokol-zig apps define SOKOL_NO_ENTRY and instead use the regular Zig main function as entry point.
Zig can be instructed to build a WinMain executable via a 'Target.subsystem', not sure how that's activated from the cmdline though, and I also didn't experiment with this yet:
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.builtin.subsystem
PS: for the missing ucrtbase.dll runtime error you're seeing, this basically says that the executable was not statically linked with the Microsoft C runtime but instead tries to load the C runtime DLL (which AFAIK isn't present by default on Windows but is expected to be installed by applications - however, that article I link below seems to say otherwise hmm...).
On Visual Studio the better fix (IMHO) is to use static linking for the C runtime (see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/crt-library-features?view=msvc-170). I don't know if this option is available on Zig. But what should definitely work is to statically link with MUSL (which seems to be the case when using the target x86_64-windows). If this then still requires ucrtbase.dll when starting then I'm out of ideas though. It should be possible to investigate where that depedency comes from via the MSVC command line tool dumpbin (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/dumpbin-reference?view=msvc-170).
kassane
I have a sokol app written in C that I would like to cross compile from mac to windows. (there is no zig code, I'm just using zig as a C cross compiler)
building with the following command produces an exe that shows a "missing ucrtbase.dll" error when launched on windows 7.
I tried instead compiling these other ways but they each produced other errors:
let me know if you need a project zip to reproduce.