First tests with MinGW (gcc for Windows)

[Enrico Maria Giordano]

What is the current release of GCC included in MinGW? As far as I know it is an older release. Am I wrong?

EMG

[Rimantas]

We already have a first release of FWH built with MinGW

And it is working really fine!

It is going to be provided as a beta to the users of the just published FWH 8.09

Antonio ,

Just request - can we get a bat or instruction for rebuilding older FWH libs ?

With best regards ! Rimantas

[Antonio Linares]

Enrico,

c:\MinGW\bin>gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 3.4.5 (mingw-vista special r3)
Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

There is a more recent version that can be installed, but they say that one is the "current" one (we guess it means "stable one").

[Antonio Linares]

Rimantas,

> Just request - can we get a bat or instruction for rebuilding older FWH libs ?

The entire FWH has to be recompiled, and we had to implement many changes in the source code, to solve errors and warnings.

You can not mix MinGW gcc OBJs (they use .O extension) with Borland or Microsoft ones.

So there is no way to provide a batch for such work.

[Enrico Maria Giordano]

c:\MinGW\bin>gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 3.4.5 (mingw-vista special r3)
Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

As I said, it is very old (four years ago!). The latest version of GCC is 4.3.2 released on August 27 2008. I'm wondering if MinGW is still an active project...

EMG

[Antonio Linares]

Enrico,

The Borland 5.5 version is back from 2000 !!!
Borland C++ 5.5.1 for Win32 Copyright (c) 1993, 2000 Borland

According to MinGW SourceForge repository, recent activity is from some weeks ago:
http://mingw.cvs.sourceforge.net/mingw/MinGW/
http://mingw.cvs.sourceforge.net/mingw/mingw-get/

[Enrico Maria Giordano]

Enrico,

The Borland 5.5 version is back from 2000 !!!

Yes, I know.

According to MinGW SourceForge repository, recent activity is from some weeks ago:
http://mingw.cvs.sourceforge.net/mingw/MinGW/
http://mingw.cvs.sourceforge.net/mingw/mingw-get/

Ok. Let's hope they will update GCC soon.

EMG

[Antonio Linares]

Enrico,

If you visit: http://www.mingw.org/ you can read this

Recent File Releases

MinGW Runtime Current Release: mingw-runtime-3.15 released (Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:14:45 GMT)

MinGW API for MS-Windows Current Release: w32api-3.12 released (Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:03:46 GMT)

MSYS Base System Technology Preview: MSYS-1.0.11 released (Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:26:45 GMT)

[Enrico Maria Giordano]

And which GCC version they have?

EMG

[Antonio Linares]

Enrico,

I don't know it for sure. We should ask it in their mailing list

[Enrico Maria Giordano]

Anyway, if the project is active then sooner or later they will update GCC.

EMG

[Antonio Linares]

Enrico,

yes, I think so.

Also, please notice the comment about Vista here (they care about Vista :

gcc (GCC) 3.4.5 (mingw-vista special r3)

And they have updated the Windows APIs two weeks ago, so they care about it: w32api-3.12 released (Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:03:46 GMT)

[TimStone]

Antonio,

You said in an earlier post that you had to re-write much of the source code to make this work.

Does that mean you are planning a separate version to work with this compiler, or are you intending to drop support for the Microsoft and Borland versions we currently use.

Since I'm using xBuilder, I would hope that FWH would continue to be compatible with that product and the Pelles compiler it includes.

Tim

[Antonio Linares]

Tim,

What I have commented is that gcc detects warnings that Borland and Microsoft don't detect, so we used that valuable info to improve our source code, but the same set of C source code is used for Borland, Microsoft and gcc.

We plan to keep using Borland and Microsoft (this one is compatible with xHB, but using VC98 !!!) as usual but we are going to offer a FWH based on gcc too, for those who want to migrate to gcc.

[Antonio Linares]

Enrico,

I just read in a MinGW forum that it is possible to download the most recent gcc sources and build them with the MinGW gcc compiler. Really cool: using an older gcc version to build the most recent gcc

http://www.nabble.com/64-bit-MinGW-on-6 ... 95954.html

"... I have built binutils 2.17.20070629 and GCC
4.3.0 from sources checked out about an hour ago. Both were built using
MinGW's GCC 3.4.5 rather than the Cygwin GCC in case that makes a
difference. ..."