Regarding MinGW GCC and the Watcom Toolchains

[a14331990]

Hello, all.
    Watcom C/C++ and GCC are the only two opensource toolsuites on Windows platform. Due to the inefficiency of binutils on Windows platform, I'm considering utilize the Watom toolchains, wlink and wlib,
for a more efficient linking process.
Have a look at here for details
http://code.google.com/p/a1mingwgcc/
     There is a great news.
In the chagelog of watcom 1.9 something exciting appeared: The linker now supports libraries in BSD, COFF, and GNU ar format.
The library manager (wlib) now supports BSD, COFF, and GNU variants of the ar library archive format.
      I'll try it when I have enough time. It may be a Linux-only feature, but porting it to MinGW/Cygwin is not very difficult, I think.
url: http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/C_Compilers_Release_Changes
Best Regards.
a14331990 a.k.a Leo

[killerbot]

but unfortunately in does lack a whole bunch of support for the STL.
That little library from the 1998 standard.

I used openwatcom a lot as an extra compiler, that compiled as an extra check my code, but many files containing certain parts of STL couldn't be compiled by it.

I didn't try the version of a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't find anything about extra STL support in the changelog.
In case you can tell me I am wrong I will be very happy ;-)

[a14331990]

I actually care only a more efficient linking process, I don't plan to use the Watcom C/C++ compiler itself, but only the linker and library manager.
Compile the source to a object file,
g++ -c hello.cpp -ohello.o
Then link into a execuable using wlink.
Unfortunately, I don't have enough time and resource to try this "compile by gcc and link by watcom" approach now. Maybe half a year later, I'll have a try.
If this approach fails, I think I can port the Windows-specific code in wlink and wlib to GNU ld.
    Another significant work I know is the porting of the whole Watcom suite (commandline only so far) to Linux platform by the Open Watcom team (this team have also ported win32api from MinGW to their suite) , it does support mix-linking gcc-compiled objects and watcom-compiled objects.

[a14331990]

I think this topic is related to Codeblocks. When the Codeblocks project grow to large enough, say, as large as Qt, building from source using MiGW GCC will cost several hours.When I build Codeblocks from source I noticed that the linking is very slow and memory-hungry. No such thing happened during the building of Codeblocks when I use GCC on Linux platform.

[reckless]

might be nice ar can be a bit of a memory hog.

hmm wonder if possible to use both lib and link from watcom with gcc ?, since gcc actually handles ms format lib quite well.

[a14331990]

Hello, reckless. Did you mean fully mix watcom suite and gcc suite?
I known in Linux world watcom compiler, linker, library manager, assembler and the corresponding gcc components are somewhat interchangeable. It's an interesting and wonderful idea. But I'm currently in shortage of time for the sake of a very important examination at jan.2011.

[reckless]

indeed what i had in mind.



and good luck on the exams