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Considering MS-DOS (Users)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 06.08.2011, 04:43

> > 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.
Good!

> 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.
Sure it can be done, but Bash assumes POSIX, so you indeed have to work around lack of "fork", "exec", etc. DJGPP did it (but it's still buggy as hell), so sure Win32 can also.

> > > 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.
I thought I read that they allowed anything that was "open source" (OSI) to be okay. But who knows, I'm no lawyer. IIRC, the only problem was redistributing the .DLL, which then of course meant you had to include their .DLL sources too (big and bulky).

> 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.
Windows never cared for POSIX much, if at all, so yeah, emulation is going to be slow. The AutoTools dudes swore that 2.64 (with heavy use of shell functions) sped up Cygwin by 30%. Dunno.

> 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".
I don't know, but rumor is that rebuilding Firefox used to take like 24 hours! I have no idea what it is these days (and presumably still a long time even on "modern" boxes).

> > 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.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure I've read a lot of people (Python??) explicitly not including it, and I don't think MS VC Express even gives permission to redistribute it. The simple truth is you (usually) don't have to redistribute it anyways as it comes with the OS. Of course, I'm talking stock MSVCRT.DLL (6.0 ??), not newer (add-on?) versions.

> 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...
LLP64 vs. LP64, bah.

> > 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.
I know, I'm just saying, watch yer back, beware dem bastards! ;-)

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