From: jqb AT netcom DOT com (Jim Balter) Subject: Re: The mail list in a news group 21 Jan 1997 21:11:59 -0800 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <32E573FA.4144.cygnus.gnu-win32@netcom.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (WinNT; I) Original-To: Carl J R Johansson Original-CC: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Carl J R Johansson wrote: > But for those who say 'the stated > objective' would be to provide a Unix environment I suggest rereading > the Web page, it says that it's a Win32 compiler even before it being > a Unix environment. You must be reading a different web page than I am. The one at http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-32 opens with "The GNU-WIN32 Project Page The GNU-Win32 tools are ports of the popular GNU development tools to Windows NT/95 for the x86 and powerpc processors." For those familar with it, "GNU development tools" does not mean "a compiler". It includes the entire c library, at a minimum. The page goes on: "With these tools installed, it is now possible to: write Win32 console or GUI applications that make use of the standard Microsoft Win32 API and/or the Cygwin32 API. easily configure and build many GNU tools from source (including rebuilding the gnu-win32 development tools themselves under x86 NT). port many other significant UNIX programs to Windows NT/95 without making significant changes to the source code. have a fairly full UNIX-like environment to work in, with access to many of the common Unix utilities (from both the bash shell and command.com). " By eliminating cygwin.dll, not even the second bullet (rebuilding the tools themselves) can be achieved, not to mention the other items, which are *fundamental* to what GNU-WIN32 has become. Note this critical bit from the "brief history" that follows the above: "The next task was to port the tools to Win NT/95. We could have done this by rewriting large portions of the source to work within the context of the Win32 API. But this would have meant spending a huge amount of time on each and every tool. Instead, we took a substantially different approach by writing a shared library (cygwin.dll) that adds the necessary UNIX-like functionality missing from the Win32 API (fork, spawn, signals, select, sockets, etc.). (We call this new interface the Cygwin32 API). Once written, it was possible to build working Win32 tools using UNIX-hosted cross-compilers, linking against this library." Frankly, those saying that emulating unix is a bad idea just don't know what they are talking about. Without the unix emulation, there *are no* tools. mingw32 cannot stand alone. > And for those who say 'why not use VC++' I could as well ask 'why not > use NutCracker/OpenNT/[put your commercial environment here]' > (personally I simply dislike it)." I don't quite understand this. So the reason not to use VC++ instead of asking that the unix emulation fundamental to cygwin be dropped is because "I simply dislike it"? None of the people asking to do this or that to cygwin has offered to pony up any money or time (except for one fellow who offered his help to Colin Peters). Given that, I think the response "then use VC++" is quite a reasonable one. This is, of course, separate from questions about static vs. dynamic libraries and breaking up dll's, which are legitimate technical questions. But this whole idea that "emulating unix poisons the project" is, well, dumb. -- - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".