Re: [cdt-dev] Supported platforms

[Doug Schaefer <cdtdoug@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 3:36 PM, Jesper Eskilson <Jesper.Eskilson@xxxxxxx> wrote:

As far as I've understood, it's kind of a "inverse wine"; windows translating Linux syscalls into Win32 equivalents at runtime. Microsoft calls it "windows subsystem for linux".

 

If it holds up to what it seems to promise, there will be no real need for e.g. MSYS.

Be careful what it promises. As far as I can tell, it's not promising anything different than Cygwin has promised. It does run in an emulation environment. The only difference is that "bash for Windows" runs actual Linux executables where Cygwin has to rebuild against it's emulation libraries. If anything, it'll kill Cygwin.

The next question is can "bash for Windows" build native executables. I guess it can if you use Ubuntu's mingw cross compilers. But then you end up in the same trouble of having to have libraries to build against, like Qt, SDL, etc. So, no, I think there's still some life for native MinGW compilers and MSYS2's real value is all the libraries they have ported over, not necessarily the shell environment.

And it is called "bash for Windows" since it's main purpose is to provide a bash shell with shell commands developers use to interact with their files and has a proper ssh utility (which I think MSYS2 is lacking). Remember that CDT runs natively and really wants to use native file paths. Making Cygwin's Linux emulated paths work with CDT has been hell, I imagine bash for Windows will be the same, since it also uses Linux emulated paths, at least that's what they showed in the demo.

Doug.

 

 

/Jesper

 

From: cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Marc Khouzam
Sent: den 30 mars 2016 20:43
To: CDT General developers list.
Subject: Re: [cdt-dev] Supported platforms

 

I'm probably jumping the gun here but I wonder if we could use the Ubuntu toolchain on Windows? 

Wait, what?

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html

I don't fully grasp what this really means, but it sounds big.

---

From: cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Doug Schaefer [cdtdoug@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: March 30, 2016 10:54 AM
To: CDT General developers list.
Subject: [cdt-dev] Supported platforms

Hey gang,

 

An interesting topic come up on the forum and twitter about the need for an Eclipse Marketplace entry for the C++ IDE. One suggestion would be to package a MinGW toolchain with it for Windows development, which we could do with the Marketplace if we hosted the toolchain somewhere else, of which there are a few options like bintray.

 

But I've been down that road before with Wascana. It's a lot of work to maintain your own toolchain package, time I'd rather spend in other areas. As such I'd prefer to depend on toolchain packages built by other people which has turned out very successful with my Arduino C++ package.

 

Until recently, though, I've been very frustrated with the state of MinGW packages out there. But I am starting to see that finally settle with the help of the MSYS2 package (https://msys2.github.io/). It's based on a fork of MSYS and supports the MinGW-w64 toolchain, both 32 and 64 bit targets. Plus they have ported the pacman package manager from Arch Linux and have a very healthy and up-to-date set of additional tools and libraries as packages, including everything we are targeting with CDT at the moment including Qt, CMake and ninja, plus other important open source libraries such as SDL, wxWidgets, OpenCV, OSG, and much more.

 

We've also talked about declaring supported platforms to help with our testing and to help guide CDT users on what environments are most likely to work well. I'd like to declare MSYS2 a supported platform for Windows. Along with that, I'd like to declare Homebrew a supported platform for Mac as it also includes Qt and CMake, though I'd support the Xcode command-line tools as the toolchain there. And of course Linux is easy but we should provide help with what packages on the most popular and strategic (i.e. Ubuntu and Fedora) to install to ensure support for CDT features.

 

The biggest task would be setting up web pages on the CDT site to provide help on setting up these environments. We'd also provide code to auto-detect the installs and set up build and debug environments. And that would allow us to add an Eclipse C++ IDE package to the Marketplace which has the same feature sets as the EPP package and we'd provide a link to the instructions and blog about them and make videos, etc. And if we get time down the road, we could provide automated assistance in setting up these environments, again similar to how I've done that with the Arduino C++ IDE.

 

Thoughts?

Doug.

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