doc: add instructions about using Visual Studio

[joyeecheung]

I am not sure why but locally using vcbuild.bat never gives me real incremental builds - I am on a fairly old laptop, running vcbuild.bat again on an already built project would still try to rebuild the binary and take ~15min to finish even if I do not change the source code at all (IIRC this was also the case ~5 years ago when I still used Windows for a while). It also floods the shell with warnings and buries any compilation errors in the warnings. On the other hand when I load node.sln into Visual Studio I am able to have better incremental build (if I do not change anything it takes <1min for it to finish the process. If I only touch some .cc files it also only takes around 1min to finish building) and the warnings are minimal, allowing me to actually see compilation errors. So I think it's worth mentioning how to use Visual Studio for people developing on Windows.

[targos]

Did you try vcbuild.bat noprojgen? To avoid rerunning the configure script, which may be one of the reasons it recompiles stuff.

[joyeecheung]

Did you try vcbuild.bat noprojgen?

I tried running with noprojgen in a project that has not been changed and it still did a bunch of building and took ~8 minutes to complete. On the other hand, building again in Visual Studio in a project with no source changes took 2 seconds to recognize that there is no changes. Adding a comment in node.cc and building it again took ~40 seconds.

[joyeecheung]

cc @nodejs/platform-windows @nodejs/build

[StefanStojanovic]

I tested on my machine. I was using the latest main, so ClangCL was forced, but I can rerun it with the v23 branch (or a bit older main) to see if MSVC makes any difference. Here is what I found:

• Running vcbuild.bat for the first time takes 14 minutes and 10 seconds, where msbuild node.sln ... takes 14 minutes
• Running it for the second time takes 55 seconds, where 45 seconds are used for the msbuild command
• Running it another time with noprojgen cuts down time to a bit under 30 seconds, where the majority of the time is used for executing the msbuild command
• Running the build from VS takes 1-2 seconds if it is already built.

On another note, when I run the build for the second time (regardless of noprojgen usage), I see no warnings or anything similar. This is the output of the build:

  histogram.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\histogram.lib
  abseil.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\abseil.lib
  v8_libbase.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_libbase.lib
  icuucx.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\icuucx.lib
  icui18n.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\icui18n.lib
  v8_libplatform.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_libplatform.lib
  v8_zlib.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_zlib.lib
  highway.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\highway.lib
  simdutf.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\simdutf.lib
  nbytes.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\nbytes.lib
  ncrypto.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\ncrypto.lib
  zlib.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\zlib.lib
  llhttp.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\llhttp.lib
  cares.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\cares.lib
  libuv.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\libuv.lib
  icutools.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\icutools.lib
  uvwasi.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\uvwasi.lib
  genccode.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\\genccode.exe
  node_js2c.vcxproj -> out\Release\\node_js2c.exe
  icudata
  nghttp2.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\nghttp2.lib
  ada.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\ada.lib
  generating object code for ../../deps/icu-tmp/icudt77l.dat 
  genccode: using architecture cpu=34404 bits=64 big-endian=0
  simdjson.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\simdjson.lib
  brotli.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\brotli.lib
  icudata.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\icudata.lib
  sqlite.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\sqlite.lib
  zstd.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\zstd.lib
  bytecode_builtins_list_generator.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\\bytecode_builtins_list_generator.exe
  torque_base.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\torque_base.lib
  torque.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\\torque.exe
  crdtp.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\crdtp.lib
  zlib_inflate_chunk_simd.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\zlib_inflate_chunk_simd.lib
  Assemble
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  zlib_adler32_simd.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\zlib_adler32_simd.lib
  Assemble
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  openssl.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\openssl.lib
  openssl-cli.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\\openssl-cli.exe
  v8_init.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_init.lib
  v8_initializers_slow.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_initializers_slow.lib
  node_js2c
  gen-regexp-special-case.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\\gen-regexp-special-case.exe
  run_gen-regexp-special-case_action
  libnode.vcxproj -> out\Release\lib\libnode.lib
  Assembling ..\..\deps\v8\src\heap\base\asm\x64\push_registers_masm.asm...
  v8_base_without_compiler.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_base_without_compiler.lib
  v8_compiler.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_compiler.lib
  v8_initializers.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_initializers.lib
  mksnapshot.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\\mksnapshot.exe
  generating: "..\..\out\Release\obj\v8_snapshot\/snapshot.cc" "..\..\out\Release\obj\v8_snapshot\/embedded.S"
  v8_snapshot.vcxproj -> ..\..\out\Release\lib\v8_snapshot.lib
  node_mksnapshot.vcxproj -> out\Release\\node_mksnapshot.exe
  node_mksnapshot
  node.vcxproj -> out\Release\\node.exe