GCC For Windows NT?

mr.potatohead asks: "I had been using cygwin to compile some UNIX programs (gd, for example) to be used in an NT environment. We all know Red Hat has bought Cygnus. RH is now charging for this once free product. So what's a geek stuck working for the man to do? Is there a good gcc option for those of us wasting away on NT?"

Sure,

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to look at GNUSoftware.com [gnusoftware.com] - that has a large list of pointers to different GNU compilers available for Windows NT.

Steve

http://steve.org.uk [steve.org.uk]

There have been some changes

[fizbin]

Last time I prowled around that site (approx. two weeks ago) I did notice that quite a few of their internal links were now broken - specifically, links to pages at www.cygnus.com would often go nowhere (since www.cygnus.com points to www.redhat.com).

I also noticed that it was very difficult to find the same documentation on the cygnus tools as one could before (e.g. html or winhelp versions of the gnu texinfo docs)

Yes it is...

[AstroJetson]

Yup, it's still free. I just got a copy last week and used it to write a little command line utility for automatically sticking checksums into S-record files. Works great as far as I can tell and it also comes with a bash shell and gdb (joy).

I gave up trying to sort out the command line options for VC++ and got gcc instead. Good ol' makefiles! Sometimes you just can't beat 'em.

DJGPP

[davster]

DJGPP is a port of gcc to DOS/DPMI. You can get it at http://www.delorie.com. It's GPL'd

borland C++ 5.5 compiler

[Imabug]

Borland/Inprise has also released it's Borland C++ Compiler 5.5 for free [inprise.com]. Note, this is not Borland C++Builder, which I gather has all the extra bells and whistles. It's just the basic C/C++ library, STL and compiler. No IDE, no Windows MFC

From the website,

The Borland C++ Compiler 5.5 (BCC) is the core of Inprise's C++ compiler technology. Borland C++ Compiler 5.5 is a blazingly fast 32-bit optimizing compiler. It includes the latest ANSI/ISO C++ compliance including the RTL, the STL framework and C++ template support. And now, Borland C++ Compiler 5.5 is openly available for free download!

Haven't gotten around to using it yet, but for people who have a hard time replicating the Unixish environment that the Cygwin compiler wants, it might be good.

Hang on... it's still free

[stab]

As far as I know, Cygnus is still free, and you can access the original web pages, and cvs trees as normal at the old homepage of http://sourceware.cygnus.com [cygnus.com].

Cygnus used to charge previously for the product as well; if you want nice manuals and stuff then you pay, which makes perfect sense.

To quote directly from the Cygnus webpage itself:


How does Red Hat's acquisition of Cygnus affect this site?
For now, very little. We thought about "conducting a process of re-engineering and re-branding with the aim of integrating our free software community outreach programs into our corporate objectives". But then we said "naah, let's just continue to have a great site to develop free software and work on making it even better".

In particular, we plan to be careful about changing the host name sourceware.cygnus.com or anything else which may require you to update your habits, CVS/Root files, etc. The name will have to change but before we go changing things around we'd kind of like to at least have a plausible guess about what we are going to change them to :-). We don't want you to have to switch over twice.



Incidentally, you may also want to check out AT&T's UWIN, at http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwi n/ [att.com] as well; very cool, does much the same thing.

HTH.
Anil

GCC without any licensing issues (i.e. CYGWIN.DLL)

[tjwhaynes]

You could try Mingw32 [mingw.org] - a port of GCC which uses MSVCRT.dll or MSCRT.dll runtime libraries instead of CYGWIN.dll and thereby avoids any licensing issues which you might run into by having to distribute CYGWIN with all your binaries. I've used it successfully for porting some of my own code without any real problems (just hiccups caused by using function names which are already used by MS libraries but not by Linux ones, or by defines which are already set up on Windows such as NOERROR or NO_ERROR).

Cheers,

Toby Haynes