Re: glib(win32) without libffi

[Fan Chun-wei <fanc999 yahoo com tw>]

於 2012/7/29 下午 09:57, Colin Walters 提到:
> On Sun, 2012-07-29 at 15:24 +0200, Hans Breuer wrote:
> I didn't say "no"; we're having a discussion. Realistically, so while 
> I personally *do* care about Windows builds, I find cross-building 
> with mingw a much saner approach to making Free Software available for 
> Windows users, though it does obviously hamper our accessibility to 
> Windows developers.
Well, I guess I have to have a say on this, IMHO... Please bear with me 
for this.

Not to take sides, but I guess Hans did make really valid points 
especially as a long time contributor to GTK+/GNOME on Windows.

The other big factor that is involved in keeping the Visual C++ build 
files up to date is due to the debugging features that are provided by 
Visual Studio,
as MinGW's gdb isn't as effective in Windows, AFAIK. It's true you can 
use the MinGW-produced libraries/DLL in Visual Studio development, but 
since the layout
of debugging info is quite different, it makes it more challenging to 
debug programs that use such DLLs. For me, I think it is the way to help 
people get involved
in the use and development of the platform, as it isn't an option (or 
people are unwilling to) for many people to develop using MinGW, 
especially at their
workplaces. For example (not to compare toolkits), the OpenSource 
edition of QT-4.x initially only supported MinGW officially on Windows, 
but due to
developer demand, they started official support for it on Visual Studio 
as well since 4.3.2 or so, which brought many positive responses for 
this move.

Anyways, I still do want to say thank you to all the people that are 
bringing the GNOME platform forward, as it did come a long way, and 
especially for Hans
and tml who made the GTK+ stack available and well-usable on Windows.

p.s. For LibFFI, I can't say much about building it with mozilla-build 
and Visual C++ 6.0, since I don't run it, but it seems from Hans comments
that it uses features provided by later Visual C++ versions, such as 
2005+, which I have managed to do and outlined in 
https://live.gnome.org/GTK+/Win32/MSVCCompilationOfGTKStack

With blessings.