win32 posix

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 8:07 pm

Dwindlehop wrote:http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml

MinGW also distributes MSys, which basically gives you a Win32 POSIX shell. Nice if you want to write or run shell scripts instead of DOS batch files without the headache of MinGW.

I decided to try this. I also installed GPG and a GPG plugin for thunderbird. It took me a little while to figure out why GPG wasn't working though (stupid WinXP made the directories it was using Read Only so it could generate a key!!!)

Peijen · Post by **Peijen** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 8:44 pm

quantus wrote:
Dwindlehop wrote:http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml

MinGW also distributes MSys, which basically gives you a Win32 POSIX shell. Nice if you want to write or run shell scripts instead of DOS batch files without the headache of MinGW.
I decided to try this. I also installed GPG and a GPG plugin for thunderbird. It took me a little while to figure out why GPG wasn't working though (stupid WinXP made the directories it was using Read Only so it could generate a key!!!)

So is there any advantage to use this over cygwin?

Post by **Jonathan** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:54 pm

Only ease of use. Cygwin is strictly more powerful than msys.

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 10:54 pm

well, there's the whole cygwin is proprietary and msys is not thing. If you want some feature that cygwin doesn't do, you can theoretically add it to msys.

The one slightly annoying thing about msys is that it mounts your devices as /c/<path> or /d/<path> or /x/<path> as opposed to cygwin which does /cygdrive/c/<path> etc...

The concept of mingw is nice. Is cygwin compatible with mingw?

Post by **Jonathan** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 11:02 pm

Oh, is that right? I didn't realize.

I have cygwin, but I haven't tried to use it for anything real. I haven't installed MinGW. So, I don't know. What were you thinking of doing?

Post by **Jonathan** » Mon Jan 31, 2005 11:05 pm

Hey:

http://www.mingw.org/mingwfaq.shtml#faq-usingwithcygwin

Peijen · Post by **Peijen** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 4:23 am

quantus wrote:well, there's the whole cygwin is proprietary and msys is not thing. If you want some feature that cygwin doesn't do, you can theoretically add it to msys.

I haven't encounter anything I wanted to run that I couldn't in cygwin. It has cvs, and subversion support, and the ability to run XWindow. No need for linux terminal!! I will just stick to cygwin.

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 6:17 am

Yeah, cygwin is fine if you have it. I don't currently have it installed, so I'll try this instead for a while. The ability to compile non-cygwin stuff with MinGW is interesting, but you don't need msys for that.

bob · Post by **bob** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 12:50 am

I don't like cygwin because every app has to ship with the cygwin1.dll, and that's caused some issues for me in the past. Nearly every time that I had a problem with my software while teaching Nintendo class, it only affected the Windows port, and it was often resolved by getting a new cygwin dll and maybe rebooting.

MinGW works fairly well, and of course lets you compile and distribute without relying on an external dll, but I've also had problems with it in the past. My nbasic compiler, for example, would often crash if I had built it with MinGW, but not with any of the other compilers, like cygwin, or a native g++ on a unix.

Peijen · Post by **Peijen** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 2:28 am

bob, have you tried this?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/

Use the software development kit (SDK), which supports more than 1,900 UNIX APIs and migration tools (conforming to the IEEE 1003.1-1990 standard), such as make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc, c89, nm, strip, gbd, as well as the gcc, g++, and g77 compilers.

bob · Post by **bob** » Sun Feb 06, 2005 8:12 am

Peijen wrote:bob, have you tried this?

Without looking too deeply at this, is that so you can cross-develop Windows apps on UNIX? Actually, that could be what I need. I also hear tell that the compiler part of MSVC (command line only) is free for download somewhere.

Peijen · Post by **Peijen** » Sun Feb 06, 2005 9:26 am

bob wrote:is that so you can cross-develop Windows apps on UNIX?

The official MS wording is "port Unix program to Windows." (cross-development? what the fuck is that? hehe) You can compile Unix code on Windows natively with this kit among other things like NFS client.

George · Post by **George** » Sun Feb 06, 2005 1:47 pm

bob wrote:I also hear tell that the compiler part of MSVC (command line only) is free for download somewhere.

Yeah, I saw it once when I was browsing through Microsoft's download page. I was surprised they were offering it for free.

I'm equally surprised by them giving away their cross-development package. I remember looking for this a while ago and they were charging for it. I wonder if they're trying to change their business model for software development?

Edit: Here's the stand-alone compiler/linker/libraries. http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/

Edit2: Stranger still, the free compiler is BETTER than the one that comes with Visual Studio Standard edition (it supports optimization)

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 9:01 am

George wrote:Edit2: Stranger still, the free compiler is BETTER than the one that comes with Visual Studio Standard edition (it supports optimization)

You know that they're so gonna start charging for it or break it somehow now... Maybe it'll insert ads into your software with click-through revenue going to MS.

George · Post by **George** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 2:42 pm

Well, I downloaded a copy to play with when I get some time. I had to give up on Visual Studio .NET because it refused to install without that bloated .NET framework. However, it looks like the toolkit may include the framework, so I may still be stuck.

Peijen · Post by **Peijen** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 3:29 pm

.Net isn't too bad, it's only 20-40mb, and your program is alot smaller because most of the library is in the .Net framework. The SDK version is quite large however, I believe it's somewhere near 1GB.

George · Post by **George** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 7:34 pm

As I remember, the framework service consumes some huge amount of memory. And it doesn't seem to relinquish it and move to the page file during the 99.999% of the time when it's not being used. And I don't want to build .NET programs, a lot of what I want to do is usually console or simple GDI stuff. I don't need 8000 XML APIs or enterprise level load-balancing or any of the other crap.

Besides which, the entire concept of a Windows-only virtual machine defeats the entire point of a virtual machine.

Peijen · Post by **Peijen** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 9:15 pm

George wrote:Besides which, the entire concept of a Windows-only virtual machine defeats the entire point of a virtual machine.

http://www.go-mono.com .Net is actually pretty nice. Much nicer than Java, now that's a piece of crap.

George · Post by **George** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 10:05 pm

I stand corrected. I still oppose virtual machines, but if there is cross-platform support it does at least make some sense.

bob · Post by **bob** » Thu Feb 10, 2005 4:33 am

How can I get the contents of a directory, using C++ code that MSVC 7 (non .Net) will like? On a "real computer", I use the opendir() function, and then consecutive calls to readdir() will give me information about each object in a directory, which will then let me traverse a directory tree. But Windows (MSVC) doesn't have these function calls, and there's some weird windows way of doing these things. Does anybody know offhand the name of a function I should be looking into? MSDN hasn't been all that helpful so far.