RE: Rebase of the pr-msvc-support branch?

[Duft Markus]

> 
> * Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 06:37:18PM CET:
> > It will solve a lot of problems if autotools can be used to
> > build real Windows programs.
> 
> Yes, but we need to address the efficiency issue.  For example,
> <http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/devel/2008/11/4959.php>
> dropped the cccl idea due to the slowness.  Now, with a binary
> wrapper things may be a bit better, still, faster fork would
> probably help loads for autotools on w32.

Using parity [1] with my libtool patch (sent to this list the one or the
other time ;), I'll update it to master if I get to it) and Interix, I
have no speed issues, except the ones introduced by the windows kernel
itself (which means that handling a lot if small files has a huge kernel
overhead compared to linux, but we can't do anything about that.

Other than that, there are no performance issues here, not even with
shell scripts, etc (of course, here-docs are the handbrake here). The
performance of parity is comparable and mostly better than that of gcc
under interix (which should perform nearly as everywhere else, except
when opening files :( ), except when linking, where ld is quite a bit
faster.

Maybe on windows, we should recommend using interix? Using it now a
while, I have a _much_ more stable impression than I had with cygwin ...
although I can't tell, since it's 2 years since I last tried it :) OTOH
interix needs a little treatment, until it gets really usable (i.e. best
is to install my gentoo package [2]).

[1] http://parity.sf.net
[2] http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/prefix/x86-interix/

Cheers, Markus

> 
> Cheers,
> Ralf
>