MinGW or MSVC compilation for Windows?

[Taita-Yam]

Hey Folks, I've managed to get a fair way into building this VST for Windows, but I suspect that my IDE (VS2017) is not able to finish the job due to the MSVC compiler.

I've resolved all the necessary paths, headers etc but the build fails at the linking stage, with jack. The jack .lib's are just the ones installed from jackaudioorg/downloads. The boost libraries are okay (probably because I built the boost/filesystem .lib's with VS2017 itself) but the linker throws 'unresolved external reference' errors when trying to link to jack. At least that is what I think is happening...

So, I am thinking of shifting the project to Code::Blocks and try to compile using MinGW.

Have you tried to build this project on Windows before? Any advice appreciated.

[chris-hld]

Hi, thanks for your effort!
I think I had that issue when working on the SSR-windows version.
Long story short: I gave up at some point and switched from VS2017 to MinGW.
I was able to link to the .libs at some point, but got nasty runtime errors once I started the application, something like this:
jackaudio/jack2#275

I just looked into this again and there seems to be hope:
These two READMEs give some details on how to make it work.
https://github.com/jackaudio/jack2/tree/master/windows
https://github.com/jackaudio/jack2/tree/master/windows/Setuphttps://github.com/jackaudio/jack/tree/master/windows/Setup
And this PR apparently builds on MSVC2017
jackaudio/jack2#318

Sorry for all the links, as I said, I gave up at some point. Maybe you are more experienced than I am and there was some activity on these issues/PR during the year.
Actually, I'll be happy to pick this up again!

[Taita-Yam]

Hey Thanks for the reply; I have tried removing all the references and functionality of jack in the source code, and it now compiles & links with lots of warnings but without errors (outputs a .vst file about ~10MB size). But it crashes Reaper and also the Steinberg VST3 plugin test host. Your links above are very useful and promising! I will give this a try

[Taita-Yam]

Some success, the crashing issue above was caused by me not having the SSREMOTE_VST env variable set correctly, and now I can load the version I compiled without jack using VS2017. No ability to create new sources though, and doesn't seem to obey Reaper's automation commands. I will investigate this separately, and open a new issue if I can't find the cause.
It is also worth knowing that the ssr configuration of "END_OF_MESSAGE_CHARACTER" must be set to '0' for the VST to communicate with the ssr instance.