Extension request: `intl` on Windows

[simonhamp]

Slightly more urgent than #429

I am going to dig into how to do it, but just wanted to raise the ticket.

[crazywhalecc]

I tried to add intl/icu support on Windows. The icu library seems to have some trouble with producing pure static libs under MSVC: The official vcxproj file only provides options to build dll.

https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/69cb085e12764b84269c31be5a054e7c510be443/icu4c/source/i18n/i18n.vcxproj#L68C1-L79C25

I may need to first solve the problem of existing extensions not being able to compile before I can actually deal with it.

[crazywhalecc]

Closed: #445 (comment)

[simonhamp]

Can we revisit this yet?

[ramsey]

There's an interesting note here about --enable-static under "Configuring ICU on Windows": https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/icu4c/build.html#configuring-icu-on-windows

the following configure options currently do not work on Windows with Microsoft’s compiler. Some options can work by manually editing icu/source/common/unicode/pwin32.h, but manually editing the files is not recommended.

[...]

• --enable-static (Requires that U_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION be defined in user code that links against ICU’s static libraries.)

[simonhamp]

From ChatGPT o1.

My prompt:

I'm trying to build the PHP intl extension statically on Windows, but I see this in the intl docs:

--enable-static (Requires that U_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION be defined in user code that links against ICU’s static libraries.)

I'm not really sure what this means.

Is it possible to compile a static version of intl for Windows?

ChatGPTs response:
Yes, you can do it, but it’s not straightforward. You need to build ICU as static libraries (so you have .lib files), and when building PHP’s intl extension, define U_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION. Essentially:

Compile or obtain static ICU libraries for Windows.

Add a compile-time definition (e.g. via CFLAGS) of U_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION for the intl build.

Link the extension against the static .lib files from ICU.

The official PHP Windows build system doesn’t handle this automatically, so you have to customize your config/win32 build scripts (and possibly ext/intl/config.w32) to inject that define and link properly. It’s definitely doable but not widely documented or tested compared to the usual shared extension build.

[henderkes]

https://vcpkg.io/en/package/icu.html

Supported on all triplets. Meaning it can build statically, dynamically and on all platforms and architectures.

[simonhamp]

@crazywhalecc please can we re-open this and try again?

[crazywhalecc]

@simonhamp I have currently added the intl/icu extension support based on vcpkg via #756 , and it has been proven to be usable through CI. In the future, spc may change after integrating full support for vcpkg, but it can currently be provided through binary distribution. If you are interested, you can build and test using the unmerged branch.