RE: [patch #6448] [MSVC 7/7] Add MSVC Support

[Markus Duft]

> 
> I Forgot to answer some things...
> 
<snip>
> 
> My patches use the same host/build as MinGW when using MSYS, on the
> grounds that the output from the MinGW tools and MSVC are compatible
> (so same $host) and that MSYS is MSYS (same $build). That's also
> how cccl has it (at least I think so...)

Hmm.. but your compiler is a different one, and thus behaves different than
mingw. I don't think it's a good idea to take the mingw triplet for
something other than mingw. Who knows - if there is something out there that
is capable of patching mingw binaries in some form, relying on code that
only gcc creates (I know that sample is kind of unrealistic, but hey - I
patch MSVC binary code ;)) - it would fail with you binaries.

> 
> >>>            The winnt was just the best that came to our ming, since
> >> the
> >>> result is plain win32 binaries.
> 
> "winnt" is not the only kind of output from MSVC. So, why is winnt
> better than win9x/winxp/win2k3 or whatever? And other tools also
> target winnt. To sum it up, I think winnt is both too narrow and
> too broad to be used as $host. Why not just parity?

I don't support the 9x series of windows, and everything else is NT-kernel
based, so I think winnt denotes all of NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, 2003R2, Vista
and 2008 - that's what I intend.

> 
> If you want to have a common name, mingw is it, that's what's used
> to denote the win32 environment w/o compatibility layers. If you
> want to go your own way, winnt is too generic.

IMHO mingw produces code that is very different from what MSVC produces -
not only performance wise (in some cases).

Maybe i586-pc-msvc or i586-pc-winnt-msvc would be better, since this
describes (in the same form as on linux) which platform I'm on. Parity as
platform would be a little bit misleading I guess, since I want everyone to
see on the first look that those binaries are native windows, and nothing
else.

> 
> That's just my view of things of course, but I have previously
> been proven to have a distorted view. So, use the salt shaker
> liberaly...

Hehe, my opinion has been proven to be distorted too. So maybe discussing on
this leads both of us somewhere :)

Cheers, Markus

> 
> >>>                                 So really the host could be *-
> >> interix* and
> >>> target of parity is *-winnt*.
> 
> Are interix binaries not in the posix subsystem? Or did you mean
> *-interix* as $build and *-winnt* as $host?
> 
> Cheers,
> Peter