JO> Windows users who wish to code fcptools should install Cygwin, another
JO> freely available toolset.
I cannot even begin to find words adequate to express the overwhelming
vehemence of my disagreement with that statement.
To me, any program that requires Cygwin is not a windows program any
more than Microsoft Word running under Wine is a Linux program.
Also, Cygwin totally 5uX0rZ from a performance point of view. I worked
for a while on the Cygwin version of the WWWOFFLE http caching proxy,
so I learned some things. Because of Cygwin, it takes longer to
retrieve a page from WWWOFFLE's cache than to fetch it fresh from the
net over a 128k link. ;P
And with Cygwin, one buys in to all the painful shit like differences
in filesystem structure and directory delimiters:
c:\ ==> /cygdrive/c
etc.
Also, binary app distros turn into a drama, because code built for one
cygwin dll version won't work for a different cygwin dll version - if
one uses cygwin, then one gets stuck with having to compile as part of
the installation process - ok for hackers but not acceptable for users.
How many major 'windows' progs use cygwin - name ONE prog featuring on
the mainstream shareware sites (tucows, cnet, davecentral, zdnet etc).
I can't see the objection to compilation forking.
The preprocessor is one of the great gifts of C that allows C to be
relatively high-level yet still interacting with the target
hardware/OS.
David
PS My attitude to Cygwin is that it's a quick cheat towards getting
*nix code to work on windows, while the native porting effort is
underway.
(I must confess I had a secret fear that someone would build in Cygwin
dependencies - John Lennon's greatest fear was that of being shot by a
crazy fan).
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