element-desktop/docs/windows-requirements.md

Windows

Requirements to build native modules

If you want to build native modules, make sure that the following tools are installed on your system.

• Git for Windows
• Node 14
• Python 3 (if you type 'python' into command prompt it will offer to install it from the windows store)
• Strawberry Perl
• Rustup
• NASM
• Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019 with the following configuration:
  • On the Workloads tab:
    • Desktop & Mobile -> C++ build tools
  • On the Individual components tab:
    • MSVC VS 2019 C++ build tools
    • Windows 10 SDK (latest version available)
    • C++ CMake tools for Windows

Once installed make sure all those utilities are accessible in your PATH.

If you want to be able to build x86 targets from an x64 host install the right toolchain:

rustup toolchain install stable-i686-pc-windows-msvc
rustup target add i686-pc-windows-msvc

In order to load all the C++ utilities installed by Visual Studio you can run the following in a terminal window.

call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" amd64

You can replace amd64 with x86 depending on your CPU architecture.