Re: Cygwin support

["Andy Scott" <kirkshorts at googlemail dot com>]

On 14/11/2008, Brian Dessent <brian@dessent.net> wrote:
> Andy Scott wrote:
>
>  > Looking over the bugzilla data base and archives of this (and other)
>  > lists I was wondering about the level of support there is for GCC on
>  > Cygwin. (I realise that it is weird half-way house to many people and
>  > so does get a fair amount of "abuse" from both the Windoze &
>  > Linux/Un*x purist camps but I like it :-) )
>
>
> Cygwin has been a secondary target for a number of years.  MinGW has
>  been a secondary target since 4.3.  This generally means that they
>  should be in fairly good shape, more or less.  To quote the docs:
>
>  > Our release criteria for the secondary platforms is:
>  >
>  >     * The compiler bootstraps successfully, and the C++ runtime library builds.
>  >     * The DejaGNU testsuite has been run, and a substantial majority of the tests pass.
>
<snip>
> Well, you can certainly use Cygwin as a base for contributing, however,
>  unless you are doing target-specific work[1] it doesn't make a lot of
>  sense to do so.  Running the dejagnu testsuite on Cygwin is
>  excruciatingly slow due to the penalty incurred from emulating fork.
>  Even with the overhead of vmware/colinux/virtualbox you're probably
>  looking at a reduction from 20-30 hours down to several hours for a full
>  testsuite run on an virtualized linux image compared to a native run
>  (depending on which languages are enabled.)
>
>  Brian
>
>  [1] And of course, don't get me wrong, that would be fantastic, as these
>  targets need all the TLC they can get.
>

Thanks for the information - and the heads up on the testsuite running times :-)

I tend to use weird and whacky versions of GCC for my work on embedded
devices so helping maintain it for another semi-weird platform will
stand me in good stead :-D

Andy
-- 
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