Re: open watcom compiling gcc on win32

["Edward S. Peschko" <esp5 at pge dot com>]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 06:46:04PM -0500, DJ Delorie wrote:
> 
> > But - the cygwin dll that I produce has to 'play well' with vc++ dlls. 
> > And *that's* what watcom provides.  In fact, that was what I was planning on 
> > doing. Compiling cygwin with watcom to produce a vc++ compatible cygwin dll.
> > 
> > And what I'm saying is that is what gcc should provide.  gcc, ld, ar, as, on win32 
> > should produce visual C++ compatible dlls.
> 
> At this point, you've left the realm of gcc and wandered into either
> the binutils realm, or the cygwin realm.  The mechanisms for producing
> DLLs are in binutils (specifically, the linker "ld"), and the policy
> for making cygwin1.dll specifically rests with the cygwin project.

well, no, I wouldn't say that I've 'left the realm of gcc' - after all, the objects
that gcc produce, and how certain features of g++ on win32 work (RTTI, etc) would 
need to change and have to work smoothly with ld, and I would argue that it is
a *steering committee* decision that could prompt such a change in cygwin.

And the suggestions I got from some members of the mingw group
was to talk to the gcc steering committee. So here I am.  And in any case,
its a point in the g++ FAQ that I'm disputing:

http://docs.freebsd.org/info/g++FAQ/g++FAQ.info.problems_linking_with_other_libraries.html

I'd say this holds true for unix, untrue for win32. 

Ed

(
ps - I'll talk to the binutils group as you suggest.. however, in order for this
to work the three groups would have to work together. which sort of doesn't leave me
too much hope that it will happen..

however, there are other reasons for looking at watcom - optimisation being one 
of the primary ones. A command decision has to be made, and perhaps the will 
will be found and a set of gnu tools that produces vc++-linkable libraries 
will be implemented along the way. This could be slightly optimistic though.. ;-)
)