Building and installing HHVM on Windows with MSVC

Windows support in general is nowhere near complete. While it is possible to get HHVM to compile under MSVC, it takes a lot of caressing, and work is still underway to bring the changes required into the main codebase.

Visual Studio Itself

First up, you need to have at least Visual Studio 2015. Anything prior will not support enough C++11 to be able to compile HHVM.

Dependencies

The first thing you'll need is all the dependencies. In the tagged release here you want the deps.7z file. Extract this file into the root of your HHVM source tree, so that there is now a directory named deps next to hphp and third-party.

We will also need msysgit, and will need to launch CMake from the msysgit bash shell so that it finds the tools correctly. This is needed because HHVM's build process requires running a few bash scripts.

Checking out HHVM and merging the required PRs

There are quite a few changes required both upstream to some other repos, and to HHVM itself in order to build under MSVC. Although work is being done to get all the required changes merged in, it's a long process.

TODO: Put together a list of the PRs that need to be merged where to compile successfully.