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Building on Linux with MSVC targets: Rust and rust9x

Note that only the last step is rust9x-specific.

1: Obtain MSVC Build tools

The simplest way to get a full MSVC toolchain is to use the Enterprise WDK. It's a positively huge download, but it contains an effectively-portable MSVC toolchain, together with the Windows WDK and SDK headers/libs.

Alternatively install the VS Build tools on a Windows system. Make sure to select the MSVC toolchain and Windows SDK at the minimum. Copy the appropriate folders (see below) over.

2: (Optional?) Set up a partition with case-insensitive filesystem support

Personally, I set up an ext4 partition with the -O casefold option, which allows chattr +F msvc-toolchains to mark any path in that folder as case-insensitive. This is necessary because different deps might try to import the import libraries with different case (e.g. KERNEL32.LIB vs kernel32.lib), which need to resolve correctly.

Of course you can also use an NTFS partition directly.

3: Set up LIB environment variable

The linker needs to know where to find the "system" import libraries. The paths are roughly as follows (tweak for your own version and target architecture):

/home/seri/mnt/ext4/msvc-toolchains/ewdk-25h2/Program Files/Windows Kits/10/Lib/10.0.26100.0/um/x86/
/home/seri/mnt/ext4/msvc-toolchains/ewdk-25h2/Program Files/Windows Kits/10/Lib/10.0.26100.0/ucrt/x86/
/home/seri/mnt/ext4/msvc-toolchains/ewdk-25h2/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/2022/BuildTools/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.44.35207/lib/x86/

LIB is semicolon-separated:

LIB="/home/seri/mnt/ext4/msvc-toolchains/ewdk-25h2/Program Files/Windows Kits/10/Lib/10.0.26100.0/um/x86/;/home/seri/mnt/ext4/msvc-toolchains/ewdk-25h2/Program Files/Windows Kits/10/Lib/10.0.26100.0/ucrt/x86/;/home/seri/mnt/ext4/msvc-toolchains/ewdk-25h2/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio/2022/BuildTools/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.44.35207/lib/x86/"

4: Use the rust-lld linker

For rust9x, the rust-lld linker is used by default.

For regular Rust, set it in .cargo/config.toml in your project:

[target.'cfg(all(target_env = "msvc"))']
linker = "rust-lld"

If you also want to compile c code, you'll likely have to set the CC env var to clang-cl as well.

5: Done

Building for your MSVC target should now work. You might additionally want to set the target runner to wine so you can just cargo run directly on linux:

[target.'cfg(all(target_env = "msvc"))']
linker = "rust-lld"
runner = "wine"

6: Building rust9x itself on Linux

Follow steps 1-3, then use bootstrap.rust9x.linuxmsvc.toml in the repo as base for your build configuration. In particular, it sets these:

[target.i586-rust9x-windows-msvc]
cc = "clang-cl"
ar = "llvm-lib"
[target.i686-rust9x-windows-msvc]
cc = "clang-cl"
ar = "llvm-lib"
[target.x86_64-rust9x-windows-msvc]
cc = "clang-cl"
ar = "llvm-lib"
[target.x86_64-pc-windows-msvc]
cc = "clang-cl"
ar = "llvm-lib"

# ...

[rust]
lld = true
bootstrap-override-lld = "self-contained"

Note that you can't build x86 and x86_64 targets in the same build, because you'll have to switch the LIB env var between them. If you figure out a way to do that automatically, please let me know!