Re: [Caml-list] Re: New version of the binary installer for Windows

[Romain Bardou <bardou@lsv.ens-cachan.fr>]

Le 02/04/2012 13:14, Adrien a écrit :
> On 02/04/2012, Romain Bardou<bardou@lsv.ens-cachan.fr>  wrote:
>> Le 30/03/2012 16:15, Jonathan Protzenko a écrit :
>>> Hi again,
>>>
>>> Following all the good suggestions in this thread, I've updated the
>>> installer. It now downloads and runs cygwin's setup.exe so as to provide
>>> a fully working environment for OCaml on windows after the installer
>>> completes. The cygwin installer runs in silent mode, that is, the
>>> progress window shows up, but there is no user prompt.
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I always heard that if you compile your program under the Cygwin
>> environment, then the application needs to be run under the Cygwin
>> environment as well; whereas if you use MinGW, you produce stand-alone
>> executables. Is that still the case?
>>
>> I need to give stand-alone executables to my users; I cannot tell them
>> to install Cygwin as well. If your installer does not let me compile
>> stand-alone executables, it has no value to me.
>
> Others have already pointed out that it wasn't necessarily the case.
>
> If you call "gcc" from cygwin, you'll end up with cygwin binaries but
> you can very simply cross-compile.
>
> Cygwin provides a POSIX environment that can also run windows stuff
> and does some translation between the two but if you cross-compile,
> you can target whatever you want and that includes "pure" windows.
>
> Also, note that msys, which is often used when cygwin isn't, is
> similar to cygwin (and it's a "light" fork of cygwin), also requires
> you to provide a specific library and changes the behaviour of the
> application. However, you should absolutely never ever build anything
> msys (msys is also a target for gcc, which has never been merged and
> is from gcc 2.95 or 2.96).
>
> With x-compilation, you can do what you want:
> - need full POSIX? cygwin
> - need some POSIX? msys (maybe)
> - need some POSIX but not a lot? a library on top of win32, or move
> away from posix directly
>
> By the way, there was a netbsd-derived environment named Interix which
> microsoft used to advise. Windows 8's documentation now advises users
> of Interix to use cygwin or mingw(-w64).
>
> Regards,
> Adrien Nader
>
>

Thanks to all of you for clarifying this !

-- 
Romain