From: colin AT bird DOT fu DOT is DOT saga-u DOT ac DOT jp (Colin Peters) Subject: RE: Default compiler behaviour for b19 11 Sep 1997 01:17:30 -0700 Message-ID: <01BCBEC1.983C8580cygnus.gnu-win32@gbird0> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Fergus Henderson[SMTP:fjh AT cs DOT mu DOT OZ DOT AU] wrote: >Geoffrey Noer writes: > >>Anthony Wesley wrote: >>> >>> Perhaps I am misreading the comments on the gnuwin32 home page, but it >>> looks like Cygnus are proposing to have "gcc -o foo foo.c" generate >>> native win32 binaries by default and not link with cygwin.dll. To >>> compile UNIX-ish tools and link with the cygwin.dll library you will >>> have to supply an extra command line option. >> >>Yes, and this may still happen at some point down the road. > >I have to agree with Anthony Wesley that this would be a Bad Idea. At first I was going to say that either default would be fine if you could override the default with an environment variable, and override the environment variable or default with a command line option. This would give the user maximum flexibility and convenience. However, I thought about it a bit, and I have to agree that 'gcc' should by default have the compatibility layer enabled. I still think you should be able to override the default in the way above though. The reason I think gcc should, by default, be UNIX is simply that all extant shell scripts which call gcc, without any other options, are basically UNIX-centric. If you are running one of these shell scripts then you are running in a UNIX-like environment. The shell script will no doubt include other UNIX isms. New scripts written with the Win32 port in mind can include an option to behave natively, but making gcc act differently by default can only break older scripts and offer very little benefit to new programmers. Of course one can, and should, be able to recompile gcc to target Win32 native with no UNIX compatibility layer, with the understanding that this retargeted gcc, like any gcc targeted at a non-UNIX machine, will not always behave as expected by UNIX scripts or when compiling UNIX code. Well, that's my opinion, for what it's worth. :-/ Colin. -- Colin Peters - Saga Univ. Dept. of Information Science -- colin AT bird DOT fu DOT is DOT saga-u DOT ac DOT jp - finger for PGP public key -- http://www.fu.is.saga-u.ac.jp/~colin/index.html -- http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/6162/ - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".