Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 08:18:12 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
cc: DJGPP List Server <djgpp AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: producing Win32 executables
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970820180154.24006R-100000@is>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.970821081446.3258A-100000@gibson>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Wed, 20 Aug 1997, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

..
> >  i've just tried out Cygnus GNU-Win32 (beta-18) on Windows NT Server and
> > NT Workstation 4.0 and it's excellent! i'm no fan of NT, but GNU-Win32
> > boasts of a very nice environment that's almost UNIX (for the UNIX fans
> > out there). GCC is (already) self-hosting on this environment, and the
> > compatibility with UNIX is pretty good.
> 
> That is great news.
> 
> However, people who need a *very* Unix-like environment should be
> aware of the followig hearsay: the Cygnus ports of GNU tools are
> mostly recompiles of the original code, with little or no
> Windows-specific changes.  For example, most Textutils and Grep don't
> use binary mode, especially when the I/O is redirected to/from a
> pipe.  So programs like `grep', `cat' or `wc' might exhibit subtle
> bugs when run on binary files.

I'm not certain exactly what this means. However, I did notice that the
Gnu-Win32 tools do NOT like DOS-style text files. I moved my /etc/profile
from my Linux box and bash parsed it OK. When I deleted some lines with
Notepad, bash couldn't read it anymore. 

In any case, gcc -pipe works, and works very well (much faster than gcc
with no -pipe option, I was wondering why this is so.. maybe because the
overhead loading the huge cygwin.dll everytime is avoided). The .EXE files
produced are excellent :)  my URL-fetcher went down to 4K stripped. That's
even smaller than the Linux binary. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Orlando Alcantara Andico
WWW:   http://www.dilnet.upd.edu.ph/~orly/   Email: orly AT mozcom DOT com
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