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

[Peter Rosin]

Markus Duft skrev:
> > 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.

Then I think you are reading too much into the host triplet, it denotes
hardware-vendor-os (and possibly -libc appended). There is no info in
there that helps you determine the compiler.

> > > > >            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.

Ok, but MinGW is also winnt. (If you stretch it a bit, Cygwin is also winnt
for that matter, but that's a different libc.)

> > 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).

I don't think that matters when it comes to the $host triplet, you can
link code from MinGW with code from MSVC. Same os, same libc.

> 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.

MinGW binaries are also native Windows binaries, and nothing else. I agree
that -parity as "-os" is bad, but since the only reason for you to add a
new -os is to make it simple for you (i.e. easy to test in configure and
libtool, no cross compiles when using interix as $build etc), I think 
-parity is the best fit.

However, i686-pc-mingw32 is perhaps not correct for Microsoft compilers
other than MSVC 6, since they use a different libc. It might also be
incorrect for MSVC 6 w/o the -MD option since then you are also using a
different libc than MinGW (i.e. msvcrt.dll).

I'm getting a headache...

Cheers,
Peter