nanoant
commented
6 years ago @mick-p1982 It would be nice to include reference to this behavior described in your commit as "Microsoft.Cpp.Win32.targets script deletes the PCH file from 2010 forward.". (1) Can you point me to some MSDN or Microsoft board or StackOverflow that describes this issue. (2) Can you quote the lines from Microsoft.Cpp.Win32.targets that trigger deletion, maybe there's some hint.
It would be really good to find some way to have both PDB and PCH working in MSVC. Reason is that I am using PDBs in my work, and I believe there's certainly and need to PDBs, otherwise when providing binary distribution I would need to provide it with .obj files to get meaningful stack traces.
So far I could not find anything, except this https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2018/07/05/shared-pch-usage-sample-in-visual-studio/ mentioning that PDB has to be copied when using /Zi:
If your projects are compiled with /Zi or /ZI (see more info about those switches at the end), the projects which use the shared pch need to copy the .pdb and .idb files produced by the shared pch project to their specific locations so the final pdb files contains pch symbols.
However, you were mentioning PCH not PDB was getting deleted.
Therefore it would be nice to understand the root cause of the issue -- (3a) is it intended behavior described by Microsoft? or it is (3b) unintended, and if so, was it reported to Microsoft.
m-7761
ghost
Trass3r
I think the new note on the /Z7 flag gives the impression that this is solution aimed at supporting 2010 (at the expense of newer editions) whereas it's really a problem that begins with 2010 and so far (at least) has no end. I.e. it applies equally to likely the most recent version of Visual Studio, whatever it is.
I spent a lot of time trying to put the PDB file in a different location, and link to it. But from what I can recall, the XML files that the compiler uses to save project information has inconsistent escaping both in Visual Studio and in CMake also. So it seemed like an intractable problem, which just magically goes away with /Z7. Even when I would make ground on the problems, and new one would always emerge. Until I think I was left with nowhere to go but to think outside the box.
EDITED: I seem to recall a problem with sharing PDB files between build-targets also. Which went beyond their early deletion. I think that the deletion is so draconian BTW because it's a foregone conclusion that sharing, and therefore referencing an external PDB is not even a possibility. Unfortunately, I cannot remember a lot of the details. I did speak on some of these things in the Kitware issue-tracker at the time, but only inadvertently.