Specify ar as MSVC's lib in Non-MSVC targets for cc crate

help
1

I am using cc crate in build.rs. My current target is x86_64-unknown-uefi. I set CC to cl and AR to lib in environment variable. It seems cc crate recognizes cl and used proper arguments to compile C codes, but it seems cc crate doesn't recognize lib as archiver and it didn't use correct arguments. Things became:

lib cq liboutput.a input1.o input2.o ...

where cq is ar-specific: lib recognize cq as a file name instead of a command.
I think I can make up some scripts to wrap lib into ar, but is there any options that let cc crate actually use lib properly?

2

normally cc should support the msvc tools very well. maybe it doesn't know the uefi target should use the msvc toolchain.

search for uefi in the issue tracker, I found #606 but they were cross compiling from linux host using clang. maybe you want to open a feature request to cc for support of the uefi target.

in the mean time, you can try this workaround by tricking cc to build for the -windows-msvc target. I might be wrong, but I think a static library built for windows is compatible with uefi:

cc::Build::new()
    .file("src/foo.c")
    .target("x86_64-pc-windows-msvc")
    .compile("foo");
3

Thanks for your answer! I haven't tried using -windows-msvc target yet, but I accidentally found that LLVM provides llvm-ar, which can replace the job as lib and it worked well. So setting AR=llvm-ar in environment variable can solve the issue.