Re: MSVC status

[Peter Rosin]

Den 2010-08-13 13:45 skrev Christopher Hulbert:
> Is there interest (besides mine) in libtool being able to use native
> Windows compilers from cygwin. I just find cygwin easier to
> use/maintain than mingw/msys.

Absolutely. But first things first. But, as I've stated previously,
MSVC is close to the native MinGW compiler in that both are native
Windows programs, and MSYS is designed to run native Windows programs.
It's just less work with MSYS than it would be with Cygwin.

Cygwin is primarly designed to run Cygwin programs, and any Windows
compatibility is considered as a distant second on the priority list.
Cygwin and MSYS might seem similar, but the two projects have
completely different goals, which is also why the two projects have
forked BTW.

mingw-get will make it easier to update/maintain MSYS/MinGW, hopefully.
But I agree, I also like Cygwin better (for most things).

> In the branch I had been working on, I defined the libtool variable
> link_search_path_spec=-LIBPATH: for native Windows compilers when host
> was cygwin/mingw, and empty otherwise. Then in the -L flag parsing of
> the libtool script, it would use $link_search_path_spec if non-empty,
> and -L otherwise.
> 
> If it's interesting to others, I would like to get it to work with
> current libtool and hopefully merged in, but I need help on how it
> should be done (otherwise it will never be merged in). Is what I
> previously did a good approach to this?

The compile script handles -L and moves the argument to -LIBPATH. I
think you will find the least resistance if you go with the flow and
do something similar for the Intel C Compiler in the compile script
as is currently done for MSVC. Their option sets looks very similar,
so it shouldn't be too hard to plagiarize. I don't know for PGI, but
I don't think you need to do anything for -L, and MSYS will handle
path conversion for you if you go that way.

> Peter: I think you are targeting mingw correct? I am targeting purely
> native Windows. Is there actually any difference in these? Would it
> make sense to have a windows host type (e.g. i686-pc-windows and
> x86_64-pc-windows)?

>From my POV, MinGW is native Windows. In what way isn't it? If we
invent the host *-windows, what is then $build? If we are on
MSYS, it will be *-mingw*. If we are on Cygwin, it will be *-cygwin*,
and we are forever stuck in cross-compiler setups. But MSYS/MinGW
is happily (well, mostly) running in its faked cross mode, why not
take advantage of its deception?

Cheers,
Peter