[Vm-dev] [OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm] Revise docs on HowToBuild on Windows: cygwin tools must be in PATH [ci skip] (PR #657)

[Eliot Miranda]

Hi Nicolas, Hi Christoph,

On Fri, Nov 4, 2022 at 2:09 PM Nicolas Cellier ***@***.***>
wrote:

> Hi Christoph,
> historically, we don't use M$ compilers, notably because of buggish
> pre-processor.
> We use the mingw layer as target architecture instead.
> Cygwin offers all the necessary tools to cross-compile for mingw target
> for a long time, so we used that.
> Nowadays, it could be wsl as well as it can perform cross-compilation for
> mingw target easily too.
> Now that Eliot added makefiles for using LLVM compiler, we could
> completely avoid mingw layer, but the makefiles still use some unixy
> commands, so we still need a unix layer; I guess that Eliot just reused the
> already existing cygwin dependency...
>
Exactly. Lazy, but it saved me a lot of time.

> If you want to replace it with something simpler (maybe msys minimal
> shell), you're welcome!
> Still, I find it nice to have a choice, compilers gradually exploit the
> presumed absence of undefined behavior more and more aggressively, compiler
> bugs happens too, we might also depend on some implementation details like
> stack handling, so keeping a mingw target (either thru gcc or clang) still
> has some value IMO.
>

Right.  At the time Andreas wrote the Win32 subsystem there was no
community edition of the M$ compilers; the only free option was gcc &
mingw.  So using the M$ compilers wasn't an option (and they weren't up to
the job).  Now things are different.  But throwing away the mingw build is
silly.  It doesn't cost us anything.
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot


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