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Considering MS-DOS (Users)

posted by marcov, 06.08.2011, 13:12

> > 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.
I said msys is moving in the direction of cygwin as a philosophy.

> 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.
Is there a mingw bash? I thought there only was a msys one. And msys afaik has a posix layer.

Some stuff like path names, console I/O, piping etc remain a problem. Yes you can get far, but sometimes you really have to question if you go that far.

Hopefully LLVM will be more platform agnostic than gcc, than we can finally kill that beast. And the license is better too.

> 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.
pathnames, pipes.

> 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".
If you can crosscompile from linux/freebsd, do so. Windows (and OS X, though less pronounced) have fairly slow executable start times, and the configure/make principle assumes that is cheap.

This makes matching *nix compilation speed on Windows (even if only in magnitude) difficult.

> Actually, I believe it is free for redistribution, in the sense of
> providing it with your program.

But then the GPL kicks in. You are allowed to use proprietary libs if it comes with the system.

OTOH afaik nowadays you are only allowed to install the VS runtime as a MSI, and one could argue that is an "OS update".

> 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.
But still a doubtful legal situation.

> 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...
Often said, but field alignment of structs are a more common and bigger problem IMHO, and likewise the *nix being LP64 (long=pointer) while Windowsi is LLP64. (longlong=pointer)

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