Proposal: Upgrade compiler version for Windows

[Phil Race]

OpenJDK 7 was made able to build with the Windows 7 SDK or Visual Studio 
Express 2010 - both free
as in no money charged..
IIRC the latter only had 32 bit compiler so the SDK was required to do 
64 bit.
So if I was you I'd first target making it work with the SDK for 32 & 64.
We couldn't do that for Sun JDK as some of the closed sources used 
features only in Visual Studio.
The job will hopefully be made easier by looking at and learning from 
JDK 7 but still don't underestimate it
and make sure it still builds on the other platforms.
You may also want to consider upping the supported build platform for 
both from
XP (32 bit) and WS2003 (64 bit) to a consistent Windows 7 SP1 x64 ..

-phil.

On 5/14/2014 5:46 AM, Ivan Krylov wrote:
> Visual studio is not free. A license needs to be purchased. However at 
> this time neither VS2003 nor VS2010 are available for purchase from 
> Microsoft. The only option there is "open boxes" at places like 
> Amazon. VS2010 is what is required for openjdk7 anyway (for those who 
> work on both versions of OpenJDK).
> We are also looking at a possibility of using a combination of Visual 
> Studio Express (2010 or later) and platform SDK (both a free). The 
> interdependencies for versions of compiler/linker/system header 
> files/dlls/DirectX headers and libs are far from being trivial.
>
> Thanks,
> Ivan
>
>