Building Node.js on Windows with Clang-cl

Recently Node.js started to support building with clang-cl on Windows. I happened to have the chance to try it out this week and while it still needs some fixups in my case, it’s mostly working very well now. Here are some notes about this. Background A hand-wavy recount about how Node.js got here: for a long time (or, as far as I could remember since I started contributing to Node.js in 2016), the official Node.js release for Windows has been built with MSVC, similar to what V8 used to be built with. At some point V8 followed Chromium and switched fully to clang-cl on all platforms, including Windows, while accepting patches from embedders like Node.js to make it at least buildable with MSVC. Last September V8 followed Chromium again and dropped support for MSVC completely from V8 13.0, which means stopping to accept this kind of MSVC compatibility patches in the upstream, so that also makes it a bit more urgent for Node.js to at least start making the clang-cl build work. There ha ... Read full article.