Re:Microsoft to C99 Developers: Use ISO C++
by jlarocco on Monday May 07, 2012 @08:17PM
(#3941561)
In my experience, using Mingw in the real world is a mess.
It doesn't play nicely with MSVC++, which is a big problem because most third party libraries on Windows are built with MSVC++ and expect projects using them to be built with MSVC++.
And the only debugger usable with Mingw is raw GDB. The debug format it uses isn't compatible with MSVC++'s debugger. Sure, GDB is very powerful, but it's very difficult to use compared to MSVC++, XCode, and even the GDB front ends on Linux.
Also, there's not much of a build system with Mingw unless you're happy with hand rolled Makefiles or using MSYS. I've never had much luck running MSYS. Maybe it's improved lately, but downloading an arbitrary open source library and trying to run "./configure && make" in MSYS is a crap shoot. Unless the library author has taken steps to make it work it probably won't.
As somebody else said, if you're porting code from Linux that uses a lot of non-standard GCC extensions, GNU Make and autotools then Mingw is tolerable as long as you can develop entirely on Linux and only use MingW for porting and testing.
There are some limited cases where it's actually pretty good, though. For example, the open source version of Qt ships its own version of GCC, GNU Make, etc, and hides the details behind their Qt Creator IDE. If you're using Qt with minimal dependencies outside of Qt, it's a nice setup. Also, GHC and the Ruby "Windows dev kit" do the same thing for compiling/building language extensions.
It doesn't play nicely with MSVC++, which is a big problem because most third party libraries on Windows are built with MSVC++ and expect projects using them to be built with MSVC++.
And the only debugger usable with Mingw is raw GDB. The debug format it uses isn't compatible with MSVC++'s debugger. Sure, GDB is very powerful, but it's very difficult to use compared to MSVC++, XCode, and even the GDB front ends on Linux.
Also, there's not much of a build system with Mingw unless you're happy with hand rolled Makefiles or using MSYS. I've never had much luck running MSYS. Maybe it's improved lately, but downloading an arbitrary open source library and trying to run "./configure && make" in MSYS is a crap shoot. Unless the library author has taken steps to make it work it probably won't.
As somebody else said, if you're porting code from Linux that uses a lot of non-standard GCC extensions, GNU Make and autotools then Mingw is tolerable as long as you can develop entirely on Linux and only use MingW for porting and testing.
There are some limited cases where it's actually pretty good, though. For example, the open source version of Qt ships its own version of GCC, GNU Make, etc, and hides the details behind their Qt Creator IDE. If you're using Qt with minimal dependencies outside of Qt, it's a nice setup. Also, GHC and the Ruby "Windows dev kit" do the same thing for compiling/building language extensions.