I’d personally avoid installing anything on a corp. PC and launching 3rd party apps from the USB stick. Especially if it hasn’t preinstalled build tools (which means it isn’t intended for software development role). Anyways, the easiest way to have “USB Stick” style Argentum installation of the minimal storage footprint is:
1. Download self-contained old demo (https://github.com/karol11/argentum/releases/download/win-demo-v0.0.16/argentum-demo.7z)
2. Copy from that 7zip a bin\lld-link.exe to your bin directory and copy all crtl-libs from libs (kernel32.Lib msvcrt.lib oldnames.lib ucrt.lib Uuid.Lib vcruntime.lib)
3. In bat-files add the dir where you placed libs to you linker invocation command line: set linker=”%~dp0lld-link.exe” /libpath:”%~dp0\libs”
“VS/MS Build tools” is much better option – it’s standard, it should be installed anyways for any kind of Windows native code development in general.
If you want to stick to llc/gcc path. Look at the run-release.sh, it uses non-Microsoft syntax.

I wouldn’t like to install anything (especially on the enterprise PC). I keep most of my soft on a portable drive. Moreover, MS Build tools are huge (at least 2.35Gb, and I’m not sure that build tools alone are enough)

So, is there a way to make it work with ld.lld.exe by changing command line params ?

1. The ld.lld.exe keeps compatibility (by command line) with gcc. While lld-link – with Microsoft link. So you need the `lld-link`. You also need crtl libraries and Windows platform libraries which can be either automatically and effortlessly installed with “Build Tools for Visual Studio” or Visual Studio Community Edition. They also provided by mingw project but it is not that simple. That’s why it’s better to just install “Build Tools”, and you’ll get both linker and all necessary libs perfectly conigured.

2. I already replied: agc fully supports “!”. the problem is with bat files. If you want to use “!” in paths, just remove the first line (actually not needed) from both run-release.bat and build-debug.bat.

ld.lld: error: cannot open /OUT:helloWorld.exe: No such file or directory
ld.lld: error: cannot open /INCREMENTAL:NO: No such file or directory
ld.lld: error: helloWorld.obj: unknown file type

If I try “original” LLVM, lld-link.exe fails with:

lld-link: error: could not open ‘uuid.lib’: no such file or directory
lld-link: error: could not open ‘MSVCRT.lib’: no such file or directory
lld-link: error: could not open ‘OLDNAMES.lib’: no such file or directory

And once again: agc.exe doesn’t support certain characters in paths (at least “!”)

Thanks for the heads-up — it’ll be fixed in the next release.
For now, just delete the first line in both run-release.bat and build-debug.bat.

Moving ag to the c:\tools\_ag fixed this.

Thanks. I should have looked at the windows event log. Installing a proper version of vc++ redistributable resolved the first problem. Now compiling works. But the debugging still doesn’t work (the same error)

If `agc` shows nothing there is something wrong with `bin\agc.exe`. Let’s check:
1. Is this Windows 10 or 11?
2. Is it x86-64 machine?
3. Is agc.exe extracted from https://github.com/karol11/argentum/releases/download/win-demo-v0.0.16/argentum-demo.7z ?
4. Run it from cmd.
5. Check for malware/viruses that could patch exe-file at the the moment of extraction.
6. Check for malware protector/antivirus alerts. They might report false positive and/or quarantine this executable.
7. In the rear case of clean windows installation agc.exe might not work with a message_box like vcruntime140_1.dll not found, it can be fixed with Installation of the “Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable” from the official MS website. Though it doesn’t look like your case.

`argentum-demo\runme.bat` only displays sources, I don’t see any *.exe
`argentum-demo\bin>agc –help` shows nothing
`run-release.bat helloWorld` doesn’t produce any visible result
`.\agc -src “..\ag” -start helloWorld -O3 -o “..\apps\helloWorld.obj”` doesn’t produce any visible result

I’ve never worked with `VSCodium` so it can’t tell much about it. For the start I’d suggest to run the `argentum-demo\runme.bat` and check if it can build and run examples.
If not, try manually execute `argentum-demo\bin>agc –help`, `run-release.bat helloWorld`, or manually execute compiler and/or linker steps from this `run-release.bat`.
If these steps succeeded, check if “C:/!code/ag/argentum-demo/bin/liblldb.dll” is a valid path to the actual dll.
There is another way to debug argentum programs – with MSVisual studio (b/c on windows it produces compatible PDBs): https://aglang.org/build-argentum-from-sources-on-windows-2/#dbg