[M3devel] platform/build_dir is a big tuple?

Mika Nystrom mika at async.caltech.edu
Wed Jan 23 08:22:54 CET 2008


Henning Thielemann writes:
>
>On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Randy Coleburn wrote:
>
>> Jay:
>>
>> For my part on Windows, I am happy to stay with the underlying OS, the
>> native windows threading, the integrated backend, and use the free
>> Microsoft Visual Studio tools.  I don't really want to have to
>> install/use cygwin or any of the other variants.  When I see target =
>> NT386, this list is what I am expecting.  For the cm3 newbie coming from
>> a Microsoft Windows environment, I think this list would be the most
>> appealing and pose the least barrier to getting starting.  Yes, I still
>> will work on the installer program once I'm satisfied that I have a good
>> working cm3 on Windows.
>
>One year ago I was in the situation to port one of my Modula-3 programs
>from Linux to Windows in order to hand it over to a Windows user. As I
>never use Windows, I have only a plain Windows installation on my machine
>with almost no tools other than cm3. I was glad to be able to run cm3
>immediately and to find all libraries that I needed in binary form without
>Cygwin dependencies - otherwise not only I had to install that on my
>machine but I also would have to persuade the other Windows guy to install
>it as well. Summarized I strongly vote for NT386 being Windows with least
>dependencies on other packages.

My experience was almost the opposite.  I had a complicated system
running on Unix, using Modula-3 for most of its implementation but
all sorts of other dirty glue to run properly, and various calls
to libc routines.  A couple of Windows people told me "please run
this stuff on our machine [we don't care how you do it]".  I promptly
installed Cygwin and got the whole thing running with a fairly small
amount of fuss.  Accordingly, I vote for NT386GNU being a Cygwin
thing that looks as much like Unix as possible!

I can certainly see the other point of view, but is there a great
need for something between these two extremes?  If I were the one
putting together Modula-3 compilers for Windows, I'd do those two
(not sure which one first) and not worry about all the other
permutations of threading libraries, compilers, etc.

     Mika



More information about the M3devel mailing list