Re: [Mingw-users] Can I get alloca.h ?

[Chris W. <ch...@qw...>]

Hi Timothy,

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Timothy Madden wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 4:52 PM, Earnie Boyd <ea...@us...>
> wrote:
> 
> > Quoting Timothy Madden <ter...@gm...>:
> >
> > > I thought it emulates a Linux or Unix system on top of Win32.
> > > Like a new Linux variant ...
> >
> > Can you tell me what led you to imagine this?
> 
> Well ... first think about *uname*, which returns MINGW32_NT, not "Windows
> XP Professional SP2"

I guess that would be MSYS uname? MSYS is a sort of "platform emulation" 
of POSIX on a Windows platform (actually a fork of an old version of 
Cygwin, which is similar). MinGW is NOT a platform or an emulation of one. 
It's a set of compilers and tools for the Windows platform (target), 
nothing more. MinGW is not MSYS, they just work well together.

It's reasonable for the uname.exe of an emulation environment to return 
something different than the host platform on which it runs. If it 
existed, a MinGW uname.exe would probably not return anything like that.

> Than many software products have a "mingw/cygwin" port, not a "Windows"
> port..

That's a bizarre and wrong description by those products (projects?). 
MinGW and Cygwin are so different that they cannot be conflated like that. 
One should consider them as completely different environments.

If a project compiles with MinGW (or MSVC, or BCC, or Watcom) and runs on 
Windows then it has a Windows port. Otherwise it does not. Running under 
Cygwin is not a Windows port, it's a Cygwin port.

> Then portable software is meant to be configured and compiled on many 
> platforms, without changes, right ?

That depends entirely on the software. Windows is so different to POSIX 
that much "portable software" does not try to be portable to it, only to 
POSIX.

> Is it not a target for mingw to be one of these platforms ?

But MinGW not a platform, so it couldn't be.

@all: would it be worth making this clearer on the MinGW home page? 
Currently it says:

"MinGW: A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows 
specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets that 
allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 
3rd-party C runtime DLLs."

I think this is confusing for new users. How about something like this?

"MinGW: A collection of free compilers and tools for Windows software 
development. Not a POSIX emulation for Windows, not Cygwin. For 
development of native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C 
runtime DLLs."

Cheers, Chris.
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