Mail Archives: cygwin/2009/07/02/18:21:38
Edward Lam wrote:
>>
>> No, they just aren't as mean as we are. We like to make things
>> purposely slow because then people suffer.
>
> I asked what I thought was a sensible question for someone who doesn't
> know the internal workings of cygwin/mingw. It wasn't meant as a flame
> bait.
Flame? Oh, my no. That was just a light warming in a little butter and
garlic. (Ah, grilled newbie, yum.) Flaming is not subtle here. Like
in many online fora, it's best to try to maintain a thick skin here, so
as to be less easily upset.
Cygwin is slow because there is a huge amount of code in it to try and
provide POSIX.1 interfaces and semantics on top of the Win32 API, so
that programs assuming a POSIX environment can just be recompiled to run
on Windows.[1] MinGW provides so few packages because they're only
trying to port the build tools, which are portable, not depending on
POSIX. That rules out a huge number of packages that would be
impractical to port directly to Windows.
[1] That's the ideal, anyway. It even happens quite a lot these days,
probably even most of the time.
[2] There's still a lot of work that goes into MinGW to handle various
Windowsisms. They're not just recompiling GCC for Windows over there.
P.S. sidefx.com, eh? I found the Houdini demo interesting, but not
enough so that I'm going to set aside C4D and modo.
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