| 26 Feb 2026 |
 dramforever | but that we've managed to have it use the wrong linker | 20:15:44 |
 emily | stop doing MinGW / Windows was not supposed to be given GCC / etc. | 20:15:54 |
 rosssmyth | rustc just tells the linker to use it | 20:15:54 |
| emily | wanted to run the GNU toolchain on a Microsoft platform anyway for a laugh? we had a tool for that: it was called DJGPP | 20:16:19 |
| rosssmyth | Rustc itself doesn't need to know where it is | 20:16:21 |
| dramforever | i didn't have to tell where the linker should be looking | 20:16:43 |
| rosssmyth | ok | 20:16:48 |
| rosssmyth | That is nice | 20:16:52 |
| emily | my guess is that it's using unprefixed gcc or something | 20:16:58 |
| emily | Rust loves to do that kind of thing | 20:17:01 |
| emily | like when they shipped x86 Linux .o files in the official rustup WASM toolchain distribution | 20:17:13 |
| dramforever | but how could unprefixed gcc be linking real windows programs | 20:17:19 |
| emily | because the compiler-builtins build would just shrug and use any old GCC if it couldn't find a Clang to pass --target to | 20:17:29 |
| emily | C compilers is the same | 20:17:36 |
| emily | yeah I don't know. creatively | 20:17:49 |
| emily | oh | 20:17:53 |
| emily | there's the thing where we fail to wrap some compilers right | 20:17:57 |
| emily | like some prefixed binutils don't get wrappers or something | 20:18:05 |
| dramforever | that would be hilarious | 20:18:14 |
| emily | I remember there's something awful like that and it causes headaches | 20:18:15 |
| emily | I think Artturin exposed me to that particular horror | 20:18:24 |
| rosssmyth | Yes, rustup ships a full mingw toolchain in the distribution bundle (including libpthread) | 20:18:25 |
| emily | (why does Rust even use libpthread on MinGW if it can use native threads on the MSVC target; is it required to use their shim layer for interoperability or something…) | 20:18:55 |
| rosssmyth | It is required because of mingw | 20:19:07 |
| rosssmyth | Basically most application have no clue what msvc is | 20:19:19 |
| rosssmyth | * Basically most applications have no clue what msvc is | 20:19:31 |
| emily | yeah but most Rust applications are like, written in Rust | 20:19:32 |
| emily | and even most C libraries that Rust applications link to probably know what an MSVC is | 20:19:38 |
| rosssmyth | Sure, but if you want to interoperate with other mingw libs written in C you must play by their rules | 20:19:57 |
| emily | I don't like how MinGW can't decide if it wants to be a free toolchain for Windows or half a Cygwin. eh whatever | 20:20:07 |
