Re: [boost] wgcc 2.0 RC1 released

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-09-19 12:41:28

"Duft Markus" <Markus.Duft_at_[hidden]> writes:

> When building with wgcc there are a few benefits:
>
> Wgcc uses the native windows compiler to build (so the code may or may
> not be faster ;o)) and whats a lot more important: the debug
> information produced is readable by visual studio, so you can debug
> the output. Gdb on windows (at least on interix) is so terribly
> broken, i could not debug 10 lines of code without gdb failing at some
> point. 

Works great for me under Cygwin, especially through emacs.

> The visual studio debugger (the 2005 version especially) is
> very very much better. (gdb on cygwin doesn't behave too good
> either. 

What's wrong with it?

> With cygwin the thing is, that cygwin isn't really quite stable on win
> xp and above when using more than one CPU. 

Never had a problem there, but haven't stressed Cygwin since I got 2
cores.  However, given your claims about Cygwin/gdb I am inclined to
wonder about this claim.

> The second thing is, that resulting executables depend on msvcrt.lib
> and are therefore binary compatible with nearly everything ;o) on
> windows. 

That's also true of MinGW, right?

> When using gcc it has it's own libc (on interix gcc is a
> interix build, and has really not much to do with windows.... ;o//)
> and one can't link those things together, so in gcc built binaries one
> can _not_ use the win32 API which, on windows, is not really desireable.

Huh?  Not so; I have used the win32 API even through cygwin GCC.
And then there's gcc -mno-cygwin.

> The last thing is, that tools such as Rational Purify may be used to
> examine the resulting binaries. It's all just really native ;o)
>
> I'm really overwhelmed that someone outside my company finally shows
> at least _some_ interest. It's really cool, give it a try!

Not sure what I'm missing here, but at this point I don't see why I
should bother.  The existing tools work for me and are
well-established, with good support.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com