Re: [Iverilog-devel] Question - Cross-compile to Windows

[Cary R. <cy...@ya...>]

Hi Evan,

Regarding #5. I personally do not find Cygwin to be a pain. All you have to do 
is select what is needed for a compilation environment from the package manager 
and then compile. This is no different then Linux. The only issue with Cygwin is 
that the executable is significantly slower.  MinGW on the other hand is/was a 
different story. I'm likely responsible for much of the MinGW ranting and when I 
last tried this it was fairly easy to get an old version of the compiler, etc. 
installed using the installer they provided, but the latest Icarus development 
required a newer compiler to support threads. Installing these updates correctly 
into the existing environment was not trivial. I believe, but have not verified, 
that there is a new installer that support all the new executables. If that's 
the case then maybe MinGW is back to being acceptable.

Cary



----- Original Message ----
From: Evan Lavelle <sa2...@cy...>
To: Discussions concerning Icarus Verilog development 
<ive...@li...>
Sent: Fri, February 25, 2011 2:09:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Iverilog-devel] Question - Cross-compile to Windows

On 25/02/2011 05:22, Aloke Kumar Das wrote:
> Hi Evan,
> Thanks for trying a new thing. Is there a benefit of doing what you have
> done?
>
> I build iVerilog regularly in msys and cygwin. I thought that is the
> easiest. Because there are just 2 -3 steps to perform.

As I see it, the benefits are:

1 - no confusion about whether to build under Cygwin or MSYS; they're 
different. The tool setup is different and is a headache. Some people 
believe that you have to run autoconf under MSYS, some that Cygwin is 
sufficient, and so on. I personally never do anything under MSYS, though 
others will say it's essential.

2 - no need to wait for Windows-native versions of the build tools; the 
cross tools should always be up-to-date. I think the native MinGW stuff 
may now be up to gcc 4.5 (they were at 3.4/5 for years), so this may not 
be an issue at the moment, but it will be again.

3 - you don't need Windows-native versions of bison, flex, gperf, and so 
on. You just use exactly the same Linux binaries as you're using for 
your native Linux build. You're also sure that you've got the right 
version of everything. You also don't need to build and run Windows 
versions of whatever tools you need in the Windows build (for Icarus, 
version and draw_tt).

4 - No confusion about whether you should have a W2K, XP, Vista, or Win7 
build system. The cross output from Linux/whatever should just run on 
all of them.

5 - the killer - developing on Windows, under Cygwin or MSYS, is a 
*major* PITA; just do a search for mingw on this mailing list if you're 
not convinced. And it's slow. Developing on a sane system and then just 
testing the output binary on Windows is *far* easier. If you modify the 
code, you can immediately check for compilation errors on the Windows 
build, just by running make on your development Linux box.

6 - however, you need to have the cross-compiler toolchain installed, 
and building a cross gcc from scratch can be a little tricky. You can 
get binaries from mingw-w64 if necessary.

7 - the other problem is getting gdb running for debug. I haven't tried 
the Cygwin gdb, but presumably it's usable. If you're doing a 
cross-build and need to debug, you'll have to set up gdb-server on the 
Windows box.

-Evan

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