Re: Reconsideration of MinGW work

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

"carlo.bramix" <carlo.bramix@libero.it> writes:

> Hello!

Hi Carlo!

> Unfortunately, the network is one of the common problems when
> porting. It could be resoved with some work and with some "tricks" if
> someone wants.

Indeed.  I know that I have patches pending for this.  I also wonder if
the MinGW Guile port at the SF page that I cited includes those tricks.
(I will take a look.)

>  Did you mean "regex" with "regular expressions"?

Yes.

> There
> are two of these libraries at mingw downloads but, unfortunately, I
> was not able to make them working: I had to take original sources and
> I recompiled myself.

Again, I wonder if the advertised MinGW Guile port has regex support.

>> Second, though, it turns out that using i586-mingw32msvc-* and Wine
>> on Linux unfortunately does not give the same results as MSYS and
>> MinGW on Windows.  For example I've found that system(NULL) throws a
>> SIGSEGV under Wine, but for Carlo Bramix, working on Windows, that
>> wasn't a problem; and instead, for Carlo, there were other problems
>> that I don't see with a Linux cross build.
>
> Yes, it seems to be a bug of WINE.  Look the sources of _wsystem()
> function at:
>
> http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=blob;f=dlls/msvcrt/process.c;h=0b1eb01d2728b4df9e7d12a457dd3065bed1f1d1;hb=HEAD

Thanks.

> I have not tried to compile latest GUILE 1.9.9 on CYGWIN but I will
> try it in the lunch pause tomorrow.  I'm quite confident it will work
> because I had not particular problems on previous versions.

Thanks, that's good to know.

> DLLs, well integrated in the system and running at a native speed that
> you will never reach in cygwin.  Although many efforts have been made,
> cygwin acts more similar to virtual machine to me.

But why?  I don't doubt that this is true - because many people have
said this, and I've seen myself that Cygwin applications seem slow.  But
why, technically speaking, is it true?

>  I'm not trying to
> change the decisions of the team in any way, I just wanted to show you
> why true win32 applications should be prefered to the ones made with
> cygwin (if this is possible to do, of course!).

Thanks.  I accept that now.

> Me too, I made a working GUILE 1.8.6 that I'm currently using and
> until now it worked fine; afterall, I'm trying to build GUILE on
> Windows since version 1.8.3 :P

Yes.  I appreciate your efforts, and I'm sorry it's taken a while for us
to get everything needed upstream.

>> - As far as future development is concerned, including the current
>> "master" branch, MinGW portability fixes should be directed at
>> Gnulib if possible, instead of done directly in the Guile code.
>
> For a project as complex as guile, probably this sounds to be a good
> solution.

Many thanks for your comments.

      Neil