Re: [Mingw-users] Thank you.

[Erik de C. L. <mle...@me...>]

James wrote:

> On Sat, 2007-09-15 at 23:17 +0000, RadSurfer wrote:
> > I simply want to respond saying that I was still curious as to the
> > great differences between outside source packages (non-mingw) and the
> > level or work needed to make them compatible.
> 
> There can be a great deal of work.  "outside source packages" often rely
> on particular resources provided by an operating system to work.

I can give you a concrete example. I am the main author of
libsndfile:

    http://www.mgea-nerd.com/libsndfile/

which reads and writes sound files and must be able to handle
files bigger than 4Gig in size.

The file I/O layer has two components, a POSIX layer (which works on
Linux, MacOSX and *nix, including Cygwin) and a windows specific layer
(using the really horrible CreateFile set of functions).

The windows layer was necessary because microsoft very poor implementation
of their POSIX I/O functions. They do have them, but they are broken
(on some versions of windows) in all sorts of horrible ways.

> > For as long as Cygwin and MinGW have parallel each other, its astonishing
> > how incompatible many source packages are (different evolutions, I realize).
> 
> Well that's the difference.  They are not parallels.  Cygwin provides a
> POSIX compatibility layer on Nodows, so sources written for a POSIX
> system may be compiled and run on Nodows with Cygwin.

Exactly.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
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"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from
time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
--  Oscar Wilde