Re: Windows support in GDB

Christopher Faylor
2005-04-29T16:36:27Z

On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 12:27:13PM -0400, Kris Warkentin wrote:
>Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
>>I haven't asked what the problem is with just using cygwin with gdb.
>>I suspect that the standard two problems are:
>>
>>1) cygwin is "slow" (which really only is an issue for configure/make)
>>
>Actually, my preliminary compilation benchmarks show a 15-20% increase
>in compilation speed on MinGW versus Cygwin.

Right! That's what I meant by "cygwin is slow".

>>2) You can't trivially include your own version of cygwin1.dll with
>>a distribution since it could conflict with a version already on
>>the system.
>>
>
>3) Paths. This is a HUGE problem because you can't assume that your
>Windows customers are interested in using a Unix style of work flow.
>MinGW supports regular Windows paths without the whole /cygdrive/
>system. If you have a pure Windows app interacting with Cygwin tools
>(take Eclipse for example) you wind up putting an awful lot of cruft in
>to deal with pathname conversion. You can even get problems when your
>debug information in your binary has either Cygwin or Windows paths.

Again, AFAIK, gdb works with native paths. If it doesn't then getting
it to work with windows paths seems like a lot less pain that getting
it to be 100% functional in native windows.

cgf