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Considering MS-DOS (Users)

posted by Dennis, 06.08.2011, 03:05

> > > I have NDN under Linux. Which key shortcuts do you refer to?
> > > Keyboard support is implemented differently in Linux, so differences
> > > there are no surprise.
> >
> > I'm not sure now, ALT+Fx?
>
> Probably a clash with X11 key shortcuts. Not sure how to (re)configure
> that, though.
Via the .xinitrc file, I believe. Been a while since I looked that that, however.

> > > There is also MinGW, an implementation of the Gnu compiler suite that
> > > uses the Microsoft runtime instead of the Cygwin POSIX layer, and there
> > > are ports of bash ansd zsh for it.
>
> As marcov hints, I'm fairly (?) certain that even MinGW Bash / MSYS needs
> Cygwin (!) due to heavy POSIX reliance. Face it, GNU is all about
> Linu^H^H^H^H POSIX. ;-)
I don't believe so. I have the MinGW and MSYS stuff here, and there's nary a copy of the Cygwin1.dll to be found in it.

The whole point to MinGW is building stuff that's a native Win32 app. In the case of things like Bash, it means some fairly heavy code changes to use Win32 system calls instead of *nix routines, but it can be done.

> > I rather use mingw32 under win. It doesn't need cygwin DLL and msvcrt
> > DLL is a standard part of windows.
>
> Cygwin's DLL is unwieldy (large) and pretty much only "free" for open
> source stuff and sometimes slow.

It's issued under the GPL, but I believe you can get a closed source license from Red Hat for $$$. It's viral - any code that links against the Cygwin1.dll also becomes GPLed code. This has caused the odd moment of confusion on the Cygwin list, from people who were afraid that anything *built* using the Cygwin toolchain had to be GPLed. No, not really. You can use the Gnu Compiler suite to build closed source programs, and the otehr Cygwin tools to assist the process. You just can't link against GPLed code.

Cygwin's DLL is about 1.9MB at this point. Whether it's slow depends on what you are doing. Since it is attempting to provide POSIX system calls by mapping to underlying Win32 primitives, how well it does depends on how closely the underlying Win32 routines map to the POSIX calls. I believe fork is an especially thorny problem, likewise signal handling.

The slower speed bit the Mozilla folks, who switched to the MSYS tools to build Windows binaries. The instigator there seems to have been Howard Chu, the Chief Architect of OpenLDAP. See http://highlandsun.com/hyc/, under "Mozilla Hacking".

> So people prefer MSVCRT (sadly), which is
> buggy (and non-free for redistribution). But yeah, everything since Win95
> (w/ IE?) had (some version of) MSVCRT. Still, I prefer the OpenWatcom way,
> don't need either .DLLs at all!
Actually, I believe it is free for redistribution, in the sense of providing it with your program. You just can't provide source (which you can't get anyway...). And since such code can only run on Windows, it's no skin of fMS's nose.

> > Also mingw gcc runs faster. But it has some
> > tricky things like I crashed my mouth when printing 64bit ints by %lld
> > and msvcrt needed %I64...
>
> Also it's a "known .DLL", part of the OS these days, so you can't
> "overload" it with a similar (better?) version. In fact, I'm not sure how
> many versions of it exist, but there are many! It's a mess. I'd strongly
> suggest avoiding it, but I guess that's not realistic since everybody uses
> it (e.g. MinGW, TCC, FreeBASIC, etc). Luckily some wise people (FreePascal)
> also avoid it! ;-)
Building for the 64 bit environment has all sorts of "gotchas". One is probably a variant of "a pointer is a pointer is an int." In a 64 bit system, it may not be...

> I guess you know that PC Magazine is a bit stingy these days about sharing
> their old DOS tools. Sad but true, just FYI. :-(
That's been true for years, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when they implemented the policy.

But PC Mag was in the same boat as a lot of other tech magazines. When the dotCOM bubble burst, a lot of the ad revenue that supported the tech mags dried up, and many titles went online only or folded entirely. PC Mag chose to restrict download access to their utilities to magazine subscribers, to try to maintain and boost circulation. But everything they'd already published had been copied to endless archive sites, so it's not like it's hard to find most of it.
______
Dennis

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