RE[2]: attempt to send plain text email.

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Jeff Sturm writes:
 > On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Mohan Embar wrote:
 > > > > building GCC on MingW is not an easy task. Contrast this to the
 > > > > speed (~3 hours) at which I can build the cross-compiler and native
 > > > > compiler on Linux and it is no contest.
 > > >
 > > >I wonder why that is.
 > >
 > > I'm not incriminating Windows. The Visual Studio command-line equivalents
 > > of make, gcc, etc. scream on Win32. It probably has to do with MSYS
 > > (the MingW bash equivalent) having to translate POSIX pathnames before
 > > feeding them to Win32 processes it spawns or something like that. Ranjit
 > > or some MSYS guru could explain this better than me.
 > 
 > Though I've never attempted a build on MSYS, I discovered some time ago
 > that Cygwin builds are painfully slow.  I traced it to the stat() call.
 > Whatever cygwin.dll was/is doing to emulate stat() involves kernel and
 > subsystem activity, noticable by watching the System and LSASS.EXE tasks
 > during a build.

It needs to look up the fd, hash the full pathname to get an inode,
and make system calls to get the device and unit.  It's quite
involved.  

Andrew.