Subject: Re: OpenNT & GNU-Win32 Comparison?
From: [email-masked] (Jason Zions)

23 Jul 1997 17:04:29 -0700
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> Are you suggesting microsoft would put any extra effort into their 
> broken posix subsystem?

I personally doubt they will, since Softway seems to be doing it for
them.

> All unix on nt software simply(?) translates calls to the windows32
> api,  is it not?

No, it is not. OpenNT is not a translation layer to Win32; it is a
native subsystem, a peer to the Win32 subsystem, and makes direct NT
kernel calls (an API which is mostly undocumented).

A beta release of gcc for OpenNT (intel and alpha) should be available
on our web site (http://www.opennt.com) by the end of the week.

The major reason "autoconfigure" failed: MSVC *cannot* be told to "shut
up" in the case of a no-errors compile; CL.EXE always prints the name of
the file being compiled to stdout, even when no errors are generated.
"configure" doesn't deal well with this. Internally, we added some cruft
to the cc script to filter out the noise, and configure worked much
better. We expect it'll run pretty cleanly with gcc.

One caveat with tcl: the tcl test suite, run under NT 4.0 earlier than
SP3, will blue-screen NT. Microsoft fixed the relevant NT kernel bug in
SP3. (tcl should be appearing on our web site in the relative near term
as well.)

> The usage of MSVC creates a mess in my opinion. 
> They tried to create a wrapper, which converts unix like path names to
> windoze like ones. At least in my case this didn't seem to work very well.

The headers we ship for use with MSVC do indeed wrap the MS-provided
headers in many cases. I'd be interested in hearing what problems you
had, Andreas, with the wrapping mechanism; the only reported troubles
we'd seen occurred when users tried to somehow reprocess or post-process
the headers we provide, which did indeed include MS headers using
absolute, DOS-style paths. The gcc port completely eliminates the use of
MSVC headers and DOS-style paths in source code.

Jason Zions
Softway Systems Inc.

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