Re: Support for MinGW compilers in the Cygwin environment

[Daniel Richard G.]

On Mon, 2013 Oct 21 18:13+0800, JonY wrote:
>
> Do not confuse Cygwin and MSYS, they are not interchangeable.

I know about MSYS; it's a good development environment, but not a
complete system, and a lot less convenient to install. I'm concerned
with using MinGW-GCC as shipped by Cygwin (not by the MinGW project) in
the Cygwin environment, as opposed to Cygwin-GCC.

> Use --host to set the cross compiler triplet instead.

The main goal of my patch was to eliminate the need to specify
triplet(s) explicitly when using the MinGW compilers on Cygwin.

In the same way that, on a Solaris machine I work with here, I can get

    $ ./config.guess 
    i386-pc-solaris2.10
    $ CC="cc -xarch=generic64" ./config.guess
    x86_64-pc-solaris2.10

it would be reasonable for config.guess (or possibly some other part of
the toolchain?) to notice when we are using e.g. CC=i686-pc-mingw32-gcc
and return a triplet reflecting that, rather than put the onus on the
user to identify what can already be inferred from the environment.

(Arguably, the same could be said for any number of [cross-]compilation
scenarios, but what distinguishes MinGW-a-la-Cygwin is its accessibility
and broad appeal as an alternative to the free-as-in-beer Visual Studio
Express toolchain. The audience for this is much bigger than, say, the
audience for building PowerPC binaries on Cygwin. So this would be a
good place to make things "just work.")

> You also run the risk of breaking non-gcc compilers.

Non-GCC compilers which define __MINGW{32,64}__? Are you
referring to Clang?

> Moreover,  *-*-mingw64 does not exist save for a short experimentation
> period. It should really be removed. The __MINGW64__ macro on the
> other hand is unrelated to any of this.

For my part, I'd be happy to refer to the system as "mingw" and not
"mingw32" nor "mingw64" (extant or not). It seems like the project as a
whole has been moving away from the "MinGW32" moniker anyway.


--Daniel


-- 
Daniel Richard G. || address@hidden
My ASCII-art .sig got a bad case of Times New Roman.