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From: "Dave Korn" <dave DOT korn AT artimi DOT com>
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Subject: RE: How to link with third party libraries using gcc
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:00:10 +0100
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On 28 June 2007 19:53, km4hr wrote:

> Well, I think I'm about at the end of my road. My purpose for trying cygwin
> was to see if it could insulate me from having to learn to program on
> Windows. But if I've got to go to MSNBC (or whatever) or google the internet
> to figure out the internals of Windows then that defeats my purpose.  I'm
> too close to the end of my career for that. I have no interest in Windows
> anyway.
> 
> I am amazed at what the Cygwin programmers have accomplished. They're
> obviously very capable programmers. But if I have to learn Windows to use
> cygwin then what's the use?  I might as well just learn the Windows
> programming tools. They're easy to use, or so I'm told.

  You have a fundamental misunderstanding here.

  You don't need to learn windows.  You can take bog-standard *nix/posix
packages, compile link and run them using gcc, with no problems.

  However, what you're trying to do here is combine cygwin code and non-cygwin
code into one program.  That is incredibly hard, and it's not cygwin's fault;
you're doing the same as if you were compiling a program on a linux box and
you decided to try and link in a windows dll and get some of the functions
from it to work.  It's very very difficult to mix these incompatible things
together, and requires deep knowledge of the platform, the toolchain, and how
they interact.  It's not brain science, but it /is/ rocket surgery.

  In other words, you're going at this the wrong way.  If you just treat
cygwin as a Unix environment and use it like that, it'd work exactly how you
expect without any of this complication.

  What exactly are these libraries, what is the product that they're part of,
and what is the /actual/ goal you're trying to get your program to achieve?


    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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