Re: [wwwdocs] 4.5/changes.html: Add windows-specific changes.

[Dave Korn <dave dot korn dot cygwin at googlemail dot com>]

Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Dec 2009, Dave Korn wrote:
>>   I looked at all the entries under "New Targets and Target Specific 
>> Improvements", and they all seemed to be categories of CPU, which I 
>> thought wasn't quite right, so I added a "Platform and O/S Specific 
>> Improvements" chunk with its own header.
> 
> I think it's okay to limit "Targets" to architectures and introduce
> a new section for operating systems.  "Platforms" can mean many different
> things, so I would prefer to call the new section just "Operating Systems"
> and use "#os" for links.  Does that make sense?

  Sure does, I'll adjust as you suggest.

> Index: htdocs/gcc-4.5/changes.html
> ===================================================================
> +<h3 id="windows">Windows (Cygwin and MinGW)</h3>
> +  <ul>
> +    <li>GCC now builds all the major the language runtime libraries as DLLs
> 
> Somehow this doesn't seem to be a proper sentence?

  GCC now builds all the major the language runtime libraries as DLLs
   V   VVVVVVVV  VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV VVVVVVV
   |       |                    |                                 |
  noun    verb           noun phrase                     subsidiary qualifier
(subject) phrase           (object)                           clause

  I don't understand where you see the grammar problem.  I'm trying to say
that older versions of GCC used to build all the major runtime libraries only
as static library archives; now it builds them as DLLs.  Is it the use of the
construction "GCC builds X" when we're talking about something built during
the configure and install process rather than something built /with/ the
compiler by the end-user?  Would "installs" or "ships with" be a better verb
choice?

> +    <li>GCC now makes use of the new support for aligned common variables in
> +    recent versions of binutils to enable better support for SSE code.</li>
> 
> Do you know which version of binutils ("versions X and later") this is?

  Yep, 2.20; I'll mention it explicitly.

> What is "better support for SSE code"?  More efficient (= "to generate
> more efficient SSE code") or something else?

  "Working, in all cases, without having to manually add something like
-fno-common to avoid getting segfaults from trying to access unaligned common
vector data".  Shall I just say "to fix bugs in the support for SSE data types"?

> +    <li>Libtool improvements simplify installation by placing the generated
> +    DLLs in the correct binaries directory.</li>
> 
> Is "binaries directory" a Windows term?  For someone with a UNIX 
> background it sounds a bit odd to put DLLs there. ;-)

  It's a Windows term on Cygwin and MinGW+MSYS platforms, which have a
meaningful concept of a /bin dir.  And it's certainly quite natural to anyone
on a Windows background to expect that DLLs should live in /bin rather than
/lib; we always expect our shared libs to be alongside our executables, and we
only have one PATH for searching both of them, rather than separate
PATH/LD_LIBRARY_PATH as on Unix.  So it shouldn't be confusing IMO.

    cheers,
      DaveK