On 2020-02-16 17:17-0500 Paul Galbraith via Msys2-users wrote:
Hi all, I'm pretty new to C/C++ (well, I last wrote something in C circa 1992 for a university programming course), so I suspect this is something obvious that I'm just not sure about. I was wondering if it's possible to use Qt with the Msys2 DLL for posix compatibility?
Hi Paul: I have no practical experience with MSYS2 and Cygwin because of the Wine bugs that currently don't allow use of either under the Wine version of Windows. However, I pay close attention to MSYS2 and Cygwin documentation because PLplot developers that do have access to the Microsoft version of Windows have had good PLplot success on both MSYS2 and Cygwin, and I also live in hope that the Wine bugs will eventually be solved so I can test those platforms myself with PLplot. So keeping that important caveat in mind, it appears to me that if you want native Windows compatibility you should be using gcc, cmake, and dependent libraries from the "mingw" repository, and if you want POSIX compatibility you should be using gcc, cmake, and dependent libraries from the "msys" repository. However, if you check those repositories at <http://repo.msys2.org/mingw/x86_64/> and <http://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/> the native mingw repository contains many more libraries than the msys repository. In particular, all the Qt libraries appear in the former, but not the latter so your dream of achieving POSIX compatibility with Qt with MSYS2 may be difficult/impossible to realize. So Cygwin might be a better bet for you, but a big question there is whether they implement POSIX compatibility via the X library which is incredibly slow on Cygwin (according to my second-hand information). In sum, from the PLplot developer perspective we positively prefer the native capabilities of MSYS2 for our interactive devices because native display is expected to be so much faster than our extremely slow (Cygwin) X experience. But the PLplot developers with Microsoft Windows access have not yet tested that expectation (one of the reasons I want to gain access to both platforms myself) so I suggest you try that speed comparison yourself between Cygwin Qt and MSYS2 (mingw) native (non-POSIX) Qt. And, I am sure you will also want to look at whether Cygwin Qt is really POSIX compatible or not and if so, does it use the (extremely slow) Cygwin X library to achieve that. By the way, if you do make such Cygwin Qt versus MSYS2 native Qt comparisons, I would like to hear about your results to help give the PLplot development team some guidance on the best platform bet for Windows Qt interactivity. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ _______________________________________________ Msys2-users mailing list Msys2-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/msys2-users