Re: [Liberty-eiffel] Liberty-eiffel Digest, Vol 26, Issue 3 - here: reasoning for using Pelles-C on Windows

[Hans Zwakenberg | Ocean Consulting GmbH]

>
> Message: 5
> Date: Sun, 06 Mar 2016 21:21:55 +0100
> From: Raphael Mack <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Liberty-eiffel] Eiffel Windows Support
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Am Sonntag, den 06.03.2016, 19:49 +0000 schrieb Bernd Schoeller:
> > On 06/03/16 19:04, Raphael Mack wrote:
> > > About more concrete steps, that some into my mind:
> > > The first step (after familiarization with Eiffel) in this project is
> > > clearly to bootstrap the compiler on Windows with a native C compiler
> > > (e. g. PellesC).
> >
> > May I ask why PellesC and not MinGW/MSYS? The license of PellesC does
> > not seem to be GNU compatible, so I consider it dangerous to build on
> > this foundation.
>
> This is a good point, I never checked the license, so yes, this should
> definitely be one of the first things to do: choose a suitable compiler.
> Somehow it seemed easy to redistribute PelleC, I think that was one of
> the reasons why it came into the discussion.
> @Hans: can you say more about this?
>

 

Hi Rahpa, Bernd et al,

 

Pelles-C is free, free as in 'free speech' AND as in 'free beer'... ;)   It can be freely used for any project, commercial or not, open or closed source.  Having said that, the compiler itself is a closed-source project.  I'm not going to take part in a discussion about the relative merits about that.  I and most Windows programmers I know - if we use 'free' tools or libraries, we like to use really free tools and libs.  That's why I prefer LGPL libraries over GPL'ed libraries...

 

As to compiler integration:  other compilers are available:  CLANG/LLVM, Code::Blocks and the ones previously mentioned.  Also, in the past we discussed integrating Tiny-C as well, more specifically to get faster edit-compile-test turnarounds.  The idea was to use Tiny-C for development and any of the others (to be implemented) for deployment...

 

Using MinGW/MSYS would keep it closer to the Linux counterpart and hence reduce integration effort, but I don't know enough about it (license-wise, deployment-wise) to be able to choose/decide between them...

 

cheers

Hans