From: Ulf Lamping
| Olivier Biot wrote:
|
| >And another *very* important reason to do so is the increased
| >performance. When running cygwin Ethereal, it runs slowly because
of
| >the slow cygwin interface (Win32 path conversion to *NIX patchs and
| >the opposite way takes ages).
|
| Do you think the path conversions are really that sad?
| Can't imagine that, as it's usually not done often and almost only
at
| startup.
Whenever a library must be loaded, this takes ages (several seconds)
on cygwin/WinXP. This does not occur with the "native" builds (MSVC or
cygwin). For instance, when you select the "Save As" dialog, cygwin
requires some library to be located. As a result, before you get to
see the dialog, several seconds (and hence billions of CPU cycles)
pass.
| I could imagine that the performance issue comes from various places
| (especially the X emulation), however didn't make tests myself on
this.
I don't think the cygwin X emulation is that slow. An xterm terminal
emulation is orders of magnitude faster than the cygwin bash shell in
a command shell.
| BTW: Beside the reasons mentioned, I like the idea of being able to
| build a free program with free tools :-)
I do agree! I have no MSVC installed for this reason.
| and with acceptable performance.
| In the long term we might getting problems with the MSVC compiler,
as
| the VC6 compiler comes to it's ages and the .net compiler
| seems to be somewhat incompatible with GPL'ed programs (as mentioned
| earlier on the list).
Yeah, I remember. It was something with the msvcrt70.dll file and
associated restrictions which have been posted earlier on the
ethereal-dev mailing list (and resulted in one library being
recompiled with MSVC6).
| So using gcc / automake on all available platforms and suggesting
| eclipse as the IDE would make sense to me for the long term.
I never used an IDE for C programming, so I can't tell its pros/cons
:)
Regards,
Olivier
