From: Dennis Newbold <dennisn@...>
Date: 2002-05-06T11:34:41+09:00
Subject: Re: ncurses, mingw32

Actually, that was the correct URL at one time.  Recently, they acquired
their own domain name / web site, and ongoing development is now hosted
at sourceforge.net.  The mingw website is at:

    http://www.mingw.org/

Essentially, mingw is gcc ported to a Windows environment in such a way
that it produces the same type ob object files as the Microsoft Visual
Studio compiler, and links with / uses the standard Microsoft MSVCRT
run time C library.  (This library comes standard with all versions of
32-bit Windows OS's except for a few of the very earliest Win95
releases.  It has to because all of Microsoft's own software links to
it, and they wouldn't run without it.  It the equivalent of libc6.so on
Linux.  It also includes a freely useable replacement for windows.h which
is 98% compatible with the one from Microsoft (as I recall, I think there
are a few very specical cases of network programming where a couple of the
structure or macro definitions are missing.  But check the website for
details.  The advantage is that you can compile standard ANSI C programs
that don't use any U*X specific features (e.g., fork, seteuid, etc.) and
run it on Windows.  And there's alot of open source software that fits
that definition -- vim, ctaga, indent, ruby, etc.  Another advantage is
that, for doing your own code, you get to use all of the neat language /
compiler features provided by gcc and which the Visual Studio compiler
lacks.  A second advantage is, if you are working on a project that you
want to be easily portable between several OS's, it helps if you do
your original development with a portable compiler like gcc.  A pretty
cool, deal, actually (sorry to be so wordy, I bet you couldn't tell I'm
kind of a mingw fan myself :).
-dln-

On Sun, 5 May 2002, tony
summerfelt wrote:

> On Sat, 04 May 2002 at 05:54 GMT, Daniel P. Zepeda  wrote:
> 
> > What exactly do you mean by 'standalone mingw32'? Is that really MinGW +
> > MSYS you are speaking of or something else? > 
> 
> 'standalone' as in 'doesn't require cygwin.
> 
> i believe this is where i got it from.
> 
> ftp://ftp.xraylith.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/mingw32/gcc-2.95.2/
> 
> software compiled with this doesn't need the cygwin dll.
> 
> -- 
> http://home.cogeco.ca/~tsummerfelt1
>