Hi Jonathan, *, On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 7:46 PM, Jonathan Aquilina <eagles051...@gmail.com> wrote: > Rainer what i want to understand is why use an external build tool when > there is an equivalent to make built directly into visual studio.
You are completely missing the point here. The default build /does/ use Visual Studio Compiler, that is the default setup/the only officially supported one to begin with. mingw ist not a make system, but a compiler. nmake is not a compiler, but a make-tool. Replacing one by the other just doesn't work, since they do completely different things. LO uses gnu make as its make-tool since that is available to all relevant systems and supports the features that are needed. And if you're wondering why the build uses the Microsoft compiler instead: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Windows_Build_Dependencies#Why_MSVC.3F ###### Why MSVC? It is a frequently asked question, usually coming from free software purists, why we use proprietary compiler instead of a free one (e.g. gcc). ABI backwards-compatibility for compiled extensions. There is some resistance to breaking that - also so far MSVC produces faster, smaller binaries. There are also some features in the code that don't compile with MinGW. They use API that MinGW does not provide headers for etc. In addition to above points also there are also open questions around how we would run unit tests in a MinGW cross-compilation environment and how well gdb works on Windows; the MSVC C++ debugger is really quite good. ###### You're comparing apples and oranges. That just doesn't make any sense. ciao Christian -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
