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I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO USE VC BECAUSE ONLY VC CAN USE THE API"S OF WINDOWS!

Who told you that bullshit?

A. Search on yahoo for mingw32 -- it's a native win32 port of gcc which links to the MSVC runtime dll (which comes with windows). Read Al Stevens' column in Dr. Dobb's; he's writing an IDE for it these days.

B. cygnus has another win32 port of GCC; IIRC you can do GUI programs with it.

C. LCCWin32 -- yet another free win32 compiler. C only, no C++, but it's a C API anyway. Dunno about COM crap; never tried that in C. In theory you can do it but I doubt that you'd enjoy it very much.

D. Borland

E. Watcom

F. Metrowerks

G. Symantec

How many compilers do you need?


I think its awefull that I am closed from the real (windows) world

I, personally, think it's awful that you haven't made the slightest effort to find alternatives. I also think it's a bit awful that you think the windows world is "real". It isn't. This month, it's a better career move than UNIX programming. Ask me again next year. Things change. Microsoft is not on the way up any more. They'll be around for a while, of course, but they are no longer successfully pretending to set the agenda.


My boss never called ms but rather ms called us and threatened us

Heh. Some self-promoting jackass of a Linux hanger-on and professional Microsoft-basher said in an article recently that using proprietary software was "criminally irresponsible" or some dumbass, fanatical remark like that. It'd serve us right if we let twits like that speak for us, and if we were to get the same bullshit back from the "other side". Poetic justice, dig? People with a war mentality always do more harm than good.

Anyway, I don't really believe that this part of your story is literally true.


As you can tell I have a big type A personality and I can invision BIlly grining . . . when he sees me fustrated with windows

Um, I have a theory about what type of personality you have, but "A" ain't it . . . Just one thing: If you happen to start thinking about climbing any towers, you know, and maybe bringing a rifle along . . . Talk to me first, okay?


As for the part at the beginning where you're afraid that you'll lose your job because your expertise will not be needed, well, hey -- that would be a GOOD thing. But NT isn't going to bring it about. Not a chance. NT needs as many sysadmins than unix does, 'cause everything about it needs constant babysitting. IIS is unstable, exchange is unstable, the OS is unstable, yadda yadda yadda. It all adds up to a hell of lot of man-hours and job security for people too lazy to work for a living, but too dumb to learn C.

Basically, I am not entirely sure that they will have to contribute MMX, KNI optimizations back to GNU.

Even if they don't, then any optimizations that are part of GPLed code must be made available to their customers in source form, and their customers can give the source (or binaries) away for free, as I read clauses 3 (must make source available) and 6 (can't stop people you provided it to from giving it away) of the GPL.

The press release says:

To fully support the Celeron and Pentium II processors, Cygnus will optimize Cygnus GNUPro in the following ways.

• Celeron and Pentium II processor performance optimizations,
• GNUPro Compiler (C and C++) Innovation - including conditional move instructions, instruction scheduling based on processor architecture, improved register allocation, integer optimizations, floating point optimizations, and MMX instruction set support,
• GNUPro Debugger enhancements - including source level debugging, Intel assembly syntax support, Cygnus Insight visual interface,
• GNUPro Libraries optimized for Intel Architecture for embedded applications,
• Assembler, linker, loader and binary utilities updated to support the Pentium II processor family,
• Stabs+ and DWARF2 debugging information incorporated into COFF and ELF object formats,
• Backward compatibility with the Pentium processor,
• Host support - Linux, Windows NT/95, Solaris/SPARC, HP-UX.

Recognizing the power of advanced processor platforms, Cygnus will also support the Pentium III processor with the following optimizations:

• Additional libraries tuned for Pentium III,
• Support in the assembler for Streaming SIMD Extensions,
• Availability and further enhancements will be announced in the second quarter of 1999.

The libraries may be Cygnus-proprietary (if they're not GLIBC-based, say), but the changes to the compiler and assembler won't be, unless they throw out GCC/EGCS, GAS, GLD, etc.

They don't say anything about KNI support in the compiler, however.

Um, Cygnus does exactly that - it guarantees immediate support for GNU development tools if you have a support contract with us. We've got some pretty major companies as customers, too.

Ecos is free and Open Source. Ecos is highly configurable. It is a complete separate OS and thus cannot be embedded in the Linux kernel. It also has very different goals from Linux: it's small, it's RT, and it runs on different hardware from Linux. For details: http://www.cygnus.com/ecos/