Re: Re: The Next Steps

[Krishna]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2021 at 13:22, Hans Zwakenberg <hz@ocean-consulting.de> wrote:
>
> Indeed, at the time I was working on Windows, more specifically, to test 
> different Windows based compilers.  (PellesC, Tiny-C, GCC)
> I've never built a Windows installer, but I do remember that I used Tiny-C to 
> create all 64-bit binaries for the compiler and the tools.  I have to dig 
> through old external hard disks to try to find these.  After I switched pc's, 
> little of those days has survived…
>

how did you bootstrap it? install.sh or by hand?

> As to my recommendations:
>
> If the target is to create an IDE sort of thing, short edit-compile-test 
> cycles are more important, and I would use Tiny-C (tcc is really quick…) for 
> that.
> For production compilation, nowadays, I'd try to implement the CLANG 
> compiler; it offers fairly good code verification and excellent optimization.
> If there is an ideological or political reason to stay within the realm of 
> GNU tools, there's GCC as well…
>

I wouldn't recommend TinyCC over mingw64. Not sure if it is fully C99
compliant. There is also the need to have the WIN32 API headers and
import libraries. If fast C compile is a requirement, PCC[0] is an
option as well and it does come with a port of the WIN32 API headers
from Mingw32[1] although the current binary distribution is a few
years old. But I would not recommend PCC over Mingw as well. Any quirk
in these compilers would manifest as either a failed compile or worse
a runtime error. GCC/Clang/MSVC are the mainstream compilers. Having a
toolchain that includes both C and C++ compilers is useful when needed
to bind to C++ libraries/toolkits. Toolkits like Qt and wxWidgets use
the mingw64 distribution for their windows binaries and that is a
testament to the quality and stability of these toolchains.

[0] http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/
[1] http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/ftp/pub/win32/