Update building from source guide for Windows

[stefnotch]

With #28244 merged, Deno is now using the widely used aws-lc-rs.
aws-lc-rs is not pure Rust code and instead depends on being able to build C/C++ code and assembly code.

This means that the "building from source" section of the contributing guide for Deno needs to be updated

Notably, on Windows the aws-lc-rs dependency requires

• A C/C++ compiler. I believe that this section covers that. I wonder if that section actually asks for too many dependencies.
• CMake. The CMake that ships with Visual Studio cannot be used for working on Deno, since it is not a globally available tool. It is only available from within a "Developer Command Prompt" and is entirely invisible to rust-analyzer.
  • Thus, one has to go out of their way to install CMake like aws-lc-rs recommends.
• The NASM assembler. This can be avoided if Deno either sets the prebuilt-nasm feature flag, or if the user sets the AWS_LC_SYS_PREBUILT_NASM environment variable. The latter requires me to do it globally for the entire system, otherwise it's easy for tools like rust-analyzer to not pick up on it.

Finally, the"building from source" guide mentions requiring a protobuf compiler. I believe that that is outdated information. I do not see what protobuf would be used for.

[paulhey]

I ran into an issue building deno from crates.io using CMake 4 on Windows. Chocolatey and Scoop both default to CMake 4 and I encountered this issue. It would appear that deno currently has aws-lc-sys@0.26.0 and the issue linked resolves it in aws-lc-sys@0.28.0. My work around was to force Scoop to install the latest CMake 3 (scoop install cmake@3.31.8)

[lucasfernog-crabnebula]

I ran into an issue building deno from crates.io using CMake 4 on Windows. Chocolatey and Scoop both default to CMake 4 and I encountered this issue. It would appear that deno currently has aws-lc-sys@0.26.0 and the issue linked resolves it in aws-lc-sys@0.28.0. My work around was to force Scoop to install the latest CMake 3 (scoop install cmake@3.31.8)

I faced the same issue, can we update to 0.28? or is there a compatibility problem?

[ryuapp]

I faced the same issue, can we update to 0.28? or is there a compatibility problem?

This seems to have been resolved with the following PR:

• build(deps): update aws-lc-rs #31307

At least it works fine on my Windows.

[stefnotch]

aws-lc-rs's latest version should no longer require cmake on Windows! aws/aws-lc-rs#828

So what's left to do is

• Updating the dependency in Deno
• Testing the installation experience on a reasonably freshly installed Windows machine

[stefnotch]

I tested it out just now, with manually updated dependencies. Yes, aws-lc-rs and libuv-sys-lite work as intended :)

Though, one has to set the environment variable AWS_LC_SYS_PREBUILT_NASM to 1. Otherwise aws-lc-rs will require the NASM assembler and will refuse to compile.

And the libz-sys dependency is still a problem child. It wants cmake.
For that one, there are 3 options

• Use the not officially supported flag 113896f
• Install cmake, which is painful to get to work
• Use a Rusty dependency, such as https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/zlib-rs . This is almost a drop-in replacement.

And a new problem child has joined the dependency tree. It is none other than https://github.com/rusqlite/rusqlite .
While Deno does set the "bundled" feature, Deno also sets the "session" feature, which enables "buildtime_bindgen" and ends up requiring more native libraries
And for that one, I don't have any suggestions. Other than the very cop-out answer of "use Linux to work on Deno, clearly that's the blessed path".