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Till Oliver Knoll wrote:
> Craig Ringer schrieb:
>>> ...
>> ... but unfortunately not with Visual C++ Express Edition. A pity for
>> those of us who want to provide open source apps and libraries with full
>> capabilities on win32, such as efficient and fast printing (with GDI+).
>
> Just out of curiosity: Why do you need the MS compiler for that? Why
> can't you access/link with the Win32 API/libraries such as GDI+ with any
> other compiler such as the one from MinGW?
MinGW does not, unfortunately, have full access to the Win32 APIs. My
understanding is that this is a legal, rather than technical,
limitation. I think it's caused by the fact that Microsoft assert
copyright (justifiably or not) on their headers. From memory, they need
published documentation to work from, and just can't copy and adapt the
Win32 SDK headers (which are not compatible with GCC).
I've never been entirely clear on why they can't just ask people to
install the Win32 SDK from Microsoft and ship a _patch_ to the headers
to make them gcc-friendly.
In any case, I'm no expert on this issue and could be entirely wrong. As
of a few months ago, however, I was definitely not able to use GDI+
under MinGW.
It's not a big issue by any stretch. I personally _prefer_ to work
outside an IDE using good 'ol vim and a terminal - even on win32, though
only just. cmd.exe is horrible when you're used to a real terminal and
shell (and cygwin isn't much better). I'm reasonably happy with MinGW,
though it seems much slower than native gcc under Linux (all in my
head?). I'm less happy that it's still gcc3. This falls very much into
the "it'd be nice if..." rather than "need" area - but I _would_ like to
be able to make sure my code is Visual Studio friendly, and I'll admit
that for some things I'd like to be able to use their debugger.
TrollTech have done a great job of making MinGW easy to install (to the
point where I usually recommend that people who want MinGW get it by
installing Qt) - but they did, IIRC, make the MinGW-only decision before
the Express Edition compilers existed. I'm just hoping that they'll
reexamine this at some point.
--
Craig Ringer
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