From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2001-10-04T08:06:15+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22036] Re: Flogging a live Window

In article <3bbb68f5$0$255$edfadb0f@dspool01.news.tele.dk>,
MikkelFJ <mikkelj-anti-spam@post1.dknet.dk> wrote:
>
>
>>of their libraries under Win32. Given the open source nature of the
>> project, mingw makes more sense than VC, though.
>
>That makes perfect sense, although I do not agree from a pragmatic point of
>view.
>
>1)  so used to having VC around that I don't really think about those who
>don't.
>But I think that most developers who don't have VC around also don't have
>Windows around - at least as a development environment.

Not true.  I can give you a real-life example:  I was working in a QA 
group where it was determined that we should NOT have VC++ installed on 
our machines because VC++ loads a lot of DLLs which mask problems later on 
(for example - we found some cases where the install script didn't install 
certain required DLLs, but if our test machines had VC++ those DLL's would 
be on the machine.  We didn't detect the problem in QA, so customers found 
it).  I did a lot of test infrastructure development there in Perl and 
later in Ruby.  I needed to write some C extensions for Ruby and 
gcc/cygwin was a great solution.

>I for one would probably choose Linux the moment I settled for gcc.

Of course, I would too, however it's not always easy to get the company 
you work for to drop Windows (or in some cases to shell out the cash for 
VC++ in these tough economic times).

>Why would I want to use gcc on Windows? The only reason I can think of is
>writing extensions to Ruby.
>
It's free, I don't have to wait for management to approve a PO to buy VC++ 
(and I don't need VC++ to do what I've been doing, so why have the 
ocmpany shell out $300 for it anyway?).  And in my work from home where I 
occasionally use 98, I can't justify shelling out the cash for VC++ either 
when gcc is working fine for me.

As I said earlier in the thread, what we really need to do right now is to 
identify problems which we believe are being caused by cygwin and file 
some bugs with the cygwin folks - that, it seems to me, is our best 
short-term solution.  

Phil