[Insight-users] compiling vtk with mingw or free VC++ Toolkit

[Atwood, Robert C]

I believe that the compiler used in Cygwin actually virtually the same
as the mingw compiler ( ported  version of gcc to win32) , however the
libraries used are different. I hesitate to go much farther with my
broken-telephone explanation, please check everything I say agains the
cygwin and mingw documentation, but I believe that if you compile with
pure mingw, it uses the existing Windows libraries whereas using cygwin,
it uses the cygwin versions of the Gnu libraries. The cygwin compiler
even has an extra flag -mno-cygwin to force the compiler to use the
windows libraries instead. Or something like that. 

This has effects on the GPL status of your executable, which should only
matter if you are actally distributing the  executable, if I understand
correctly. Also 'no-cygwin' compiled objects should not require the
cygwin1.dll. But, if the program asks for objects that are expected int
the Gnu library, it might not find them in the windows libraries.

(eg I could not compile a fairly simple program straight away with mingw
due to drand48() not existing in Windows library) 

I agree with Luis, that it would be easiest to just get Cygwin. The
caveat is that I have found that activity is so high on the Cygwin
project  that the versions of everythign keep changing faster than you
can download them :-0 and sometimes breaks your old stuff, and some free
software distributes its binaries including a cygwin1.dll version that
will conflict with the (newer) one you got from cygwin.com, and so on...
what you may expect from a popular open project.



-----Original Message-----
From: insight-users-bounces at itk.org
[mailto:insight-users-bounces at itk.org] On Behalf Of Luis Ibanez
Sent: 26 July 2004 14:56
To: Nicolaus Andratschke
Cc: insight-users at itk.org
Subject: Re: [Insight-users] compiling vtk with mingw or free VC++
Toolkit



Hi Nic,


A) The VC++ Toolkit from Microsoft lacks components
    needed for building systems such as VTK and ITK.
    In particular is doesn't have:

            1)  nmake
            2)  lib

    Therefore, it cannot build a complex project
    and cannot create a library    :-/


B) Borland Bcc 5.5 is known to work with ITK.
    We have nighly and continous builds with it
    on the Dashboard.


C) ... don't know about mingw...


D) You may want to consider Cygwin as an option.
    This will give you GCC, plus a full fledged
    Unix system inside your Windows system. You
    can download Cygwin for free from

           http://www.cygwin.com/


Regards,


    Luis


----------------------------------
Nicolaus Andratschke wrote:

> Has anybody achieved compiling itk with the free mingw compiler or the

> VC++ Toolkit from Microsoft.
> 
> I'm still struggling compiling itk 1.6 with either
> Borland BCC5.5, mingw 3.1 or VC++.
> 
> NIC
> 
> 
>


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