From: Sean O'Halpin Date: 2006-07-22T01:21:42+09:00 Subject: Re: One-Click Installer: MinGW? or VC2005? On 7/21/06, Austin Ziegler wrote: > > Not quite. MinGW won't give you 64-bit Windows support. Nor will Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition - it's 32-bit only. > The better question is not "easier"; the better question is "which > will give me *better*" binary results? The answer to that nearly every > time will be the Microsoft toolchain. Apparently the Intel C/C++ compiler wins on this score (haven't used it myself, so I am not speaking from experience, just from what I've read on the net). Personally, I don't think there is a no-brainer answer to this question - any decision will surely be a compromise between competing forces. The question we Win32 users of Ruby need to address is what matters most. I'll try to explain what matters to me. Others will undoubtedly have different priorities but for me, it is the ability to easily re-use libraries that come from the *nix side of the Ruby community. With regards to Windows libraries, as far as I see, apart from the excellent work by Daniel Berger, Park Heesob, Curt Hibbs and a few others, there is not nearly the same level of input from Windows users. Also, if I really need to program something using a Windows-specific API that is only supported by MS tools, I use those MS tools. I can't really buy the performance arguments - if I were really concerned with a 10% difference in performance between compilers, I wouldn't be using Ruby in the first place - I'd code it in C. The performance difference I care about is programmer performance. I found myself spending far too much time trying to get Ruby & all those useful libs to compile under the most recent versions of VC++. It is not because Curt can't be bothered to upgrade that the One-Click is still using VC6. I agree with you that the maintainers of many of those parent libs make no effort to accommodate the Win32 toolchain. Why should they? They don't use Windows. I seriously doubt whether bitching at them will make any difference. We develop on Windows and target both Windows and Linux. Two of my developers work in Mac OS/X. I want our code to be portable and for there to be as little impedance as possible in getting things to work on all three platforms. However, I can understand that others may have different points of view depending on their requirements and I wouldn't assume that ours is the common case. Perhaps we could spell out those requirements in this discussion so they could be taken in to account? Regards, Sean