From: Nick AT fys DOT ruu DOT nl (Nick van Eijndhoven) Subject: Some problems/suggestions concerning GCC 7 Feb 1997 08:04:56 -0800 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199702071447.PAA07506.cygnus.gnu-win32@ruunf0.fys.ruu.nl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Original-To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Original-Cc: Nick AT fys DOT ruu DOT nl (Nick van Eijndhoven) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Dear GNU development team, I am developing programs in C++ for one of the large future experiments at CERN (Geneva). I do this on my windows95 PC and I am now looking for an implementation of gcc (or g++ if you like) on the win95 system with which I can generate DLL's. So far I have been happy with the DJGPP package, but no effort is made there to implement DLL's. I then saw your web page announcing DLL support and so I took your all.tar.gz file from the cygnus site and tried a few things. Here are my experiences : * After having unpacked and installed the all.tar.gz package I could compile my C++ programs without any problem. Also the lib.a creation using "ar" run well. So far the good news .... * The ar facility in your beta 17.1 release behaves differently from some unix platforms (and also DJGPP v2.0). The difference is that for your ar one can't say "ar -s lib.a *.o" whereas in DJGPP and some unix environments one can. The "ar -s lib.a *.o" for a non-existing lib.a then acts as your "ar -rs lib.a *.o". Since in High energy physics we have developed very poweful source code management systems (e.g. CMZ) where also library creation commands for various platforms have been incorporated, it would be nice if all GNU products would stick to 1 convention for ar. I would prefer the "ar -s " functionality to be reintroduced again in case the lib.a doesn't exist. The idea is that in these large collaborations we are trying to make the GNU software to a standard to be used worldwide. * None of the examples you give for creating DLL's work, when the example programs foo, bar etc... are specified to be C++ source (i.e. foo.cc, bar.cc etc...) It would be convenient if an argument -dll could be added to the ar facility, such that apart from the file lib.a also a file lib.dll would be created automatically. Since the ar command gets all the *.o files as arguments, it could create automatically the .def file and if then ar would invoke dlltool if the argument -dll was specified everything would go in 1 pass. The fact that currently one has to make the .def file by hand is a pain. Furthermore, what should I put in the .def file for a C++ class ? * Since I am only interested in getting GCC, it would be convenient if you would also have a gcc.tar.gz with a full working gcc but without all this UNIX stuff. If I want to run UNIX I can install your ULTRIX operating system instead of windows95. * The directory structure of all.tar.gz is unnecessary complicated with all these long names. for gcc.tar.gz a structure a la DJGPP would be much more simple and transparant. i.e. something like : C:\ | gcc |-bin | |-lib | |-include | |-tmp would be more convenient, where the 'include' directory could then have (if needed) some subdirectory per language (e.g. C, C++, objC etc...). * It would be convenient if the user could specify the env. vars : C_INCLUDE_PATH CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH LIBRARY_PATH so that here one could also add his private directories. Cheers, Nick van Eijndhoven *----------------------------------------------------------------------* Dr. Nick van Eijndhoven Department of Subatomic Physics email : nick AT fys DOT ruu DOT nl Utrecht University / NIKHEF tel. +31-30-2532331 (direct) P.O. Box 80.000 tel. +31-30-2531492 (secr.) NL-3508 TA Utrecht fax. +31-30-2518689 The Netherlands WWW : http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~nick Office : Ornstein lab. 172 *----------------------------------------------------------------------* - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".