LIBRARY_PATH is not considered by the build system on Windows

[Guigui220D]

Zig Version

0.14.0-dev.27+0cef727e5

Steps to Reproduce and Observed Behavior

As far as I understand, the LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is what GCC uses and is supposed to work on Windows, but it doesn't. Apart from that there is really no standard environment variable for libraries for linkers, am I wrong?

My workaround was parsing the environment variable from my build.zig but absolute paths are discouraged.

Expected Behavior

The linker should use the absolute paths present in the LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

[rohlem]

I don't know whether Zig plans to support automatically reading library search paths from a LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. I think this would make the build process more difficult to isolate and keep reproducible, because as it becomes easier for some unexpected interaction to happen.

Note that you can already specify library search paths using the -L/--library-directory CLI options (see zig <command> --help for whatever command you're using in your build process).
With this it should already be possible to manually specify the value of any environment variable to the CLI.

[Guigui220D]

Some environment variables are already taken in account like C_INCLUDE_PATH, though

[Guigui220D]

@rohlem also that is already the case on linux:

zig/lib/std/zig/system/NativePaths.zig

Line 161 in 82a934b

if (std.posix.getenv("LIBRARY_PATH")) |library_path| {