Re: [Mingw-users] using mingw with cl and makefiles

[John G. <jo...@jo...>]

Dill, John wrote:
> My first question is whether you can use the Visual C++ compiler cl
> with mingw?

MinGW is a collection of tools with its own compiler. I take this to 
mean you want to know if you can use GNU Make with the Visual C++ compiler?

If so, then yes. You can use Makefiles to do quite a bit, and they are 
not constrained by a compiler. I use Makefiles for tasks that do not 
involve programming languages or compilers and they work fine. They are 
quite versatile.

> I would like to adapt the makefile system if possible to translate
> the makefile commands to the appropriate compiler commands, flags,
> for the cl program.  Any suggestions to help get me started (or to
> shoo me away from trying this)?  Has anyone wrote a simple makefile
> which uses cl?

If you write the Makefile correctly you can easily change it for any 
compiler. I.e. you set a single variable that is used to set specific 
compiler-dependant variables later on. I use this to compile the same 
source on multiple systems. Even with GCC, compiling a shared object or 
DLL is not the same between Linux and Windows (executables are pretty 
much the same most of the time). I do not see why you could not extend 
this to work between compilers as well.

-- 
John Gaughan
http://www.johngaughan.net/
jo...@jo...