Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/08/24/10:21:05
On 22 Aug 1999, Mumit Khan wrote:
> There is a limited set available -- gdb, make, bison, sed, diffutils --
> but mostly scattered around.
Are these ports available from the URLs you mentioned in your message?
If not, where are they available?
> I won't do it since there are already good
> existing ports such as Cygwin etc, and I have no problems with 10-20%
> slowdown in running dev tools.
My problem with Cygwin ports is not the slow-down, it's the subtle bugs
and misfeatures. I cannot recommend a set of tools to a user of Windows
if those tools don't support backslashes and drive letters in file names
(try "ls a:\*.c" some day). IMHO, the problem with the Cygwin ports is
that they decided to solve all incompatibilities between Unix and Windows
in the libraries, and leave the application code intact. This simply
doesn't work. Even worse, it *almost* works, leaving the 10% of rare
cases where all kinds of subtle issues bite the uninitiated.
> Now, a question for those who want to develop under DOS and want to target
> windows32: Why not build a mingw cross-compiler under DJGPP? That way, you
> get the whole DJGPP dev environment and dev tools, and get to code for
> win32 at your heart's content.
This is probably a good idea, but it would waste some of the effort,
because DJGPP tools don't work well on NT (mainly due to bugs in the NT
DOS emulation and DPMI services, and to lack of support for long file
names for DOS programs). So the resulting development setup will only be
a good option for Windows 9X.
OTOH, there should be no special problems to add development tools to
Mingw by reusing the fruits of the several years of efforts in porting
GNU tools to DJGPP. The first approximation should be simply to go
through the ported sources and add #ifdef _WIN32 where there's already
#ifdef __DJGPP__ or #ifdef __MSDOS__. The second approximation would be
to enable some of the code disabled for DOS which native Windows
application can use, like fork/exec, pipes, etc.
I also expect that some of the effort should go into writing a good
Posix-compliant library, because otherwise some of the DJPP-ported code
won't work well. Here, again, reusing the DJGPP library sources (which
are free software) should provide a useful starting point.
I would suggest that people who want to use Mingw for serious development
invest some effort along the above lines. I would expect this to be not
very hard, after so many subtle problems have been identified and
successfully solved by DJGPP. Most of these problems are common to DOS
and Windows environments.
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