On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 02:35:27AM -0500, DRC wrote: > I suspect that I'm the first person to have ever attempted to build the > TigerVNC Windows components on an actual Windows machine using MinGW, so > I thought I'd share my experience thus far.
I was able to built TigerVNC with MinGW as well on Windows, btw :) (but only with GCC 3.4.5). > So, the basic problems are as follows: > > (1) Only a very specific MinGW toolchain can be made to work with our > build, and even that requires some tweaking (editing libstdc++.la.) > > (2) This allows only a subset of the Windows components to be built. > > (3) The toolchain is a pain to install. > > (4) The performance of the toolchain is unacceptable. I've never compared binaries built with GCC and Visual Studio but after quick googling it seems GCC is better (or far more better) compiler than MSVC in terms of performance. I've never tested GCC 4.5 as a Windows cross compiler but at least on 64bit Linux programs compiled with GCC 4.5 are faster and smaller than GCC 4.4 programs, probably due new link-time optimizations feature. > I understand everyone's general aversion to Visual C++ and the desire to > have an integrated build system, but it also seems really bad that the > only viable way to build the Windows code is by using Linux. To be honest, you are right I don't like Windows as a development platform, but more real problem is that I don't have a Visual Studio license and I don't want to pay for it only due TigerVNC project. We can have and maintain both GNU and Visual Studio build systems but we should have a maintainer for it. I will maintain GNU build system but, as I wrote above, I can't maintain Visual Studio build system because I don't have Visual Studio. I see Visual Studio as an advantage only if one of the TigerVNC developers use Windows & VS as a primary development environment, which is probably not our case (if I read mails correctly you use OS X and me, Pierre and Peter uses GNU/Linux). In my opinion you can safely use former MinGW with GCC 3.4.5 even if it is slower than MSVC, "production" builds of TigerVNC will be built with GCC 4.4 or GCC 4.5 which are better than MSVC. But as I wrote above, if you would like to resusciate VS build system and maintain it, feel free to do it, you have my vote. Regards, Adam -- Adam Tkac, Red Hat, Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Tigervnc-devel mailing list Tigervnc-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tigervnc-devel
