From: Lyle Johnson <ljohnson@...>
Date: 2001-10-05T00:07:23+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22087] Re: Flogging a live Window

> I haven't read the details of all the messages, but it seems to me that
> people think one must use the cygwin dll, and therefore be tied to cygwin,
> if one uses cygwin at all.  Isn't there a linker mode that will link to
the
> Windows dlls?  -mnocygwin or something like that?

If you use the -mno-cygwin switch (which may be obsoleted in the future)
with the Cygwin version of gcc it simply switches over to compiling &
linking against the MinGW headers and import libraries -- a different set of
files than the standard Cygwin headers & libraries. So while it's true that
you're removing the dependency on the Cygwin DLL, you're also losing any of
the benefits (sic) of developing with Cygwin in the first place (i.e. the
POSIX layer emulation).

> I personally like the idea of not having to be tied to extra products, and
I
> also like the idea of not having to have VC++.  Wouldn't this do nicely?

I think if we can find a way to make it work for everyone, MinGW would be
the preferred solution. What would be even better is if the DLLs built by
MinGW (i.e. for Ruby extensions) are bit-compatible with Visual C++ DLLs.
This may *already* be the case -- I just haven't studied the issue enough
yet. If that's true, then it should be true that developers can build Ruby
and its extensions using either MinGW or Visual C++, it wouldn't matter.