Re: [boost] [build] Building library with vc++ 64-bit does not find vcvarsall.bat

Subject: Re: [boost] [build] Building library with vc++ 64-bit does not find vcvarsall.bat
From: James E. King, III (jking_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-10-13 20:34:44

On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 4:11 PM, Edward Diener via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> If I build any library with any version vc++ 64-bit compiler, by using
> address-model=64, the vcvarsall.bat is looked for at, for example with
> msvc-14.0, C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio
> 14.0/VC/bin/vcvarsall.bat and is not found. Naturally this leads to basic
> compilation failures. The path for vcvarsall.bat for msvc-14.0 is
> C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0/VC/vcvarsall.bat
> instead. All versions of vc++ follow this path structure for vcvarsall.bat
>
> Building with any version of vc++ 32-bit, by not specifying the
> address-model, works correctly.
>

I do not see this behavior on my system, using a stock cmd.exe (not running
from a Visual Studio command line prompt) using the command:

    c:\boost\libs\format\test>rmdir /s /q c:\boost\bin.v2\libs
    c:\boost\libs\format\test>..\..\..\b2 toolset=msvc-14.0
address-model=32,64 variant=debug,release -q -j5

The resulting test binaries were correctly 32-bit and 64-bit.
If I do not specify address-model on the command line, I get a 32-bit
executable.
I find it quite odd that 32-bit would be the default here.
In the summary output after launching b2 when building, 64-bit is not
displayed as a line item either, only 32-bit is.  But on linux 32-bit and
64-bit line items are shown in the summary.

If I do the same build with msvc-14.1 as the toolset, the default output is
also 32-bit.
It looks like there is some technical debt that needs to be addressed
here.
Shouldn't default builds on Visual Studio 2015, 2017 be 64-bit if not
specified?

- Jim