Re: Voting begins on removing OpenWatcom support
- Posted by CoJaBo2 Oct 26, 2012
- 3615 views
What about making a 'real' voting?
I think the problem with that would be that the reasons for the votes should count more than the votes themselves. Here, there are 3 votes for either side giving absolutely no reason why. An additional two votes for on each side state nothing more than it works/doesn't work.
One vote for Watcom states that "It can compile to .exe", and another says that "people are still downloading it" (no offense, but neither of these make any sense as reasons).
This leaves 5 votes against Watcom, due to lack of 64-bit support and/or taxing of developer time; and one for it, stating that it is easier to use.
Indeed, documentation does need to be written both on installing MinGW and migrating from OW to GCC- but this should not be significantly harder to set up (or bundle, if need be) than it was for OW.
Dropping the support for the last (i call it like this) 'native' Windows Compiler seems to me important.
MinGW is a port of GCC to native Windows (as opposed to the Cygwin version of GCC, which uses a POSIX emulation layer); MinGW is no less "native" than Watcom, which is a port originally from 16-bit DOS.
With OpenWatcom there is not only a Compiler also there are tools like Resource Compiler/Editor, Debugger/Spy etc.
The debugger in GCC is called GDB. GCC doesn't have a resource editor though; if that component is useful, we should indeed look for a substitute. (Since those tools aren't specific to compilers, it should be possible to use the Watcom resource editor with GCC-compiled programs if you wanted to; though it might support only 32-bit binaries).
Also i checked the Downloads on Sourceforge and they tell me, that more People downloaded the Euphoria-OW Package than all the *IX Packages togheter.
Which just tells us that most Eu users run Windows; comparing it with the other Windows versions (4.0.4, since there are too few stats for the newer version) shows that about 49% get the non-OW installer, 36% get the OW installer, and 15% get the zip (which doesn't include OW). (About 6% of these are Linux and Mac users; so people aren't necessarily downloading the correct versions anyway)
Edit: As it seems a lot of people prefer the bundled version and I'm sure windows sdk cannot be bundled, does anyone has anything to say about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang ? From what I've read in the license, it may be what we are looking for. Also there's Pelles C compiler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelles_C Anyway, I think still the best option is MingW.
Neither MS nor Pelles are open-source, which might pose licensing issues bundling them with an OSS project. LLVM (Clang) is starting to compete with GCC, but I don't think theres a Windows port yet.
