On 31 May 2015 at 04:39, Shachar Shemesh via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: > On 30/05/15 11:00, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d wrote: >> >> >> When he says Windows, he means MSVC, gcc backend will never support >> interfacing that ABI (at least I see no motivation as of writing). >> > I thought that's what MINGW was. A gcc backend that interfaces with the > Windows ABI. Isn't it?
If your program is isolated, MinGW is fine. Great even! But the Windows ecosystem is built around Microsoft's COFF formatted libraries (as produced by Visual Studio), and most Windows libs that I find myself working with are closed-source, or distributed as pre-built binaries. You can't do very large scale work in the Windows ecosystem without interacting with the MS ecosystem, that is, COFF libs, and CV8/PDB debuginfo. Even if we could use MinGW, we ship an SDK ourselves, and customers would demand COFF libs from us. LLVM is (finally!) addressing this Microsoft/VisualC-centric nature of the Windows dev environment... I just wish they'd hurry up! It's about 10 years overdue.