On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Antonio Scuri
<scuri@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
As always the problem is not the compiler. MingW still
uses the MSVCRT.DLL. This RTL has two great pros for re-distributing DLLs: it
is already installed on the system and does not depends on a manifest. This
would be heaven… But I think it has many cons.
Those pros out way the cons by a long shot for many. In fact the manifests caused so many issues because MS pushed updated to your machine that are not labeled as run-time updates and uprev the run-time version. [1](See the comments too)
It is an old DLL with known bugs and it is not maintained
anymore. The main development environment for Windows is still Visual C++. The
free Windows SDK already includes a command line version of VC. Visual C++
Express edition is a free fully featured IDE. And for those who are used to
develop in Visual C++ to build DLLs with several dependencies using gcc is not
an easy task.
The same things can be said for GCC though. It has many free and good IDEs. The compiler has always been free. etc... In my experience the age of the run-time has never caused issues. Do you have specific cases where this has been an issue for you?
BTW the official stable version of MingW still uses GCC
version 3. I just downloaded version 5.1.6 to check that. If I’m not
mistaken GCC 4 must be manually installed.
Yes you need to manually install, but I found an installer from GCC 4.4.x. But from reading the mailing list it is clear to me that they are not going to release an installer anymore (which is a shame, but doesn't change the fact that GCC3.x is not the official release anymore) On the mailing list they clearly state that GCC 3 is not the official release. You can see this in the file release section of SourceForge. The GCC v4.x is not a "technology preview" anymore.
Maybe in 2010 we see some improvements on that (VC or
MingW). But for now we have vc8 and vc9. So back to the issue, what do you
think of moving from vc8 to vc9?
I didn't notice any improvement as I am testing the beta of VS2010. Just another run-time to choose from.
