On Wed, 9 Sep 2026, Zhongteng Gui wrote:
Considering that most POSIX functions we provide are just forwarded to Microsoft's dll, but there do exist a few exceptions, I'd like to ask whether we should add more POSIX functions through libmingwex.a, or maybe just a inline wrapper of other CRT functions in headers?
No, I don't think we should add more POSIX functions in general, unless there's a very strong rationale for it.
The main purpose of mingw is to be a free SDK for windows development. Historically, in order to be able to build GCC/binutils for Windows, a small subset of extra POSIX functions have been added as well. There's no clear boundary for what subset we provide and what we don't though, but I don't think we should just keep expanding it, in general.
User code sometimes provide their own implementations of such functions if they use them, and whenever we change the set of functions we provide, there's a risk that we break some of them. (Ideally, all applications should use build system checks for the functions before they replace them, but this isn't what all projects do.) This has happened almost every time we've added something before.
// Martin _______________________________________________ Mingw-w64-public mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mingw-w64-public
