From: s2172184 AT cse DOT unsw DOT edu DOT au ("Ben Constable")
Subject: Re: cygwin.dll
17 Jan 1997 18:25:16 -0800
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> As far as Hello World goes,... it is calling a DLL (Dynamic Link Library)
> distributed with Windows.  If you didn't have a 60+ MB windows directory
> with a butt-load of DLL's then you wouldn't be able to have a 17K hello 
> world app.  If you write MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) code, you have
> to distribute the MFC DLLs since they don't come with windows.  But,
since
> you probably have installed MFC programs before, you probably already
have
> those DLLs in your windows directory <== that was an example BTW.

A hello world without debug info and statically linked takes up very
little. In fact, it takes up 19968 bytes on my machine (watcom c++,
statically linked, console mode, no debug).

Why should the statically linked cygwin exe file be bigger?
 
> Anyway, having a cygnus DLL is just fine IMHO since that's the way 
> applications should access libraries.  Almost every system I know of uses
> Dynamic Linking.

Sometimes dynamic linked is undesirable. I think that maybe the cygwin dll
should be broken up like the NT system dlls are broken up. One for IO, one
for sockets, etc. That way you could still distribute the small executables
with one or two library files.

> As far as conflicts go, I didn't have any problems.  RTFM.  There are
several
> things to configure that aren't really documented nicely but since it's
> BETA, get off their back.  They are doing a wonderful job.

I agree it is working well so far, but there are a lot of things to be done
before I will do anything serious with the stuff. And some issues need to
be resolved, such as static linking, etc.

Ben Constable
s2172184 AT cse DOT unsw DOT edu DOT au

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