Compiling C++20 to use <format>header in windows-runner

[Sunchock]

Hi,

I have wrote a GitHub Action to compile my project with the windows-latest runner but it shows me the following error :

src/Window.cpp:2:10: fatal error: format: No such file or directory
    2 | #include <format>
      |          ^~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
make: *** [<builtin>: src/Window.o] Error 1
Error: Process completed with exit code 2.

After checking cpprerefence, header is included in g++ 13
I know there is the fmt library to replace header but I would like to know if it's possible to use the standard one with the runner.

So i would like to verify if the runner-image uses g++ 13 and I checked the image details. Actually windows-latest is win22/20230508.3 and uses MinGW-w64 11.2.0 but the official changelogs for MinGW-w64 don't have the 11.2.0 version so it's confusing me.

I added g++ --version to my action to get more infos.

g++.exe (MinGW-W64 x86_64-posix-seh, built by Brecht Sanders) 11.2.0
Copyright (C) 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

So I supposed that MinGW-w64 11.2.0 version is for g++ in reality and not correspond to the MinGW-w64 itself, maybe a little confusion here ?

Did I miss something ? How to configure runner to get header pls ?

[ilia-shipitsin]

are you able to run g++ 13 locally (on your computer) ? how did you install it ?

[Sunchock]

Yeah I'm able to do that, I installed it using mingw64 and adding the g++ folder to my PATH environment variable so I can call it from my base cmd.

[ilia-shipitsin]

MinGW-w64 11.2.0 installed from choco gallery: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/mingw#versionhistory

[vpolikarpov-akvelon]

Hey @Sunchock. You are right, 11.2.0 is not a version of MinGW-w64 itself, but the version of bundled GCC package.

Here is the release that is installed in windows-latest image: https://github.com/brechtsanders/winlibs_mingw/releases/tag/11.2.0-12.0.1-9.0.0-r1. It includes GCC 11.2.0 and Clang 12.0.1.

But according to this page, text formatting has been implemented only in GCC 13 and Clang 14. So looks like this feature is not supported by github-hosted runners indeed.

[Sunchock]

Hey, thanks for your response. I saw that winlibs_mingw now supports GCC 13 in latest versions. Does this mean github-hosted is now using this version please?

[erik-bershel]

Hey @Sunchock!
Sorry to say it, but GCC 12.2 is the latest available in windows-latest.