Compiling Under Wine

now3djp writes "Interesting article over on CodingStyle that demonstrates how I successfully eliminated wasted time maintaining an MS-Windows computer when I could build natively from my GNU computer! /. has followed other cross compilers in the past. This article is different because I used MS's own compiler! This allowed me to get on with real games porting; with only a proportional increase in compile time. Wine has really come a long way in supporting simple apps, let us hope it reaches a 1.0 soon."

Comments

Re:which begs the question

[bstadil]

Begging the question does not mean what you think it means.

It means :

"to assume something that hasn't been proven as a basis of one's argument,"

"Wine is not good because it is open source", or "Microsoft's compilers are bad because it is closed source", are examples of Begging the question.

Re:Awesome

[EvilSporkMan]

Well, it won't be WINE, since WINE Is Not an Emulator, as we all know. =P

Re:which begs the question

[fredrik70]

VC++ isn't a bad compiler at all, really. They got a quite shitty implementation of the STL lib though(might have changed now - I use VC++ 6). Also isn't properly following the C++ ANSI standard. for example the scope whenyou declare vars in for loops is broken. MS is aware but they can't really fix it easily now, since *lots* of old MFC code would break if they fix it. Yuo can set a flag though to enforce ANSI but it not on by default. Compiler makes quite good code though. If you want a more 'proper' closed source compiler go for Borland's - the command line version is even free on their website! (after a rather hefty registration proc though)

Re:No! No! No!

[njchick]

There are bugs in Windows that VMWare may not duplicate.

Care to give an example? I think if you run Windows under VMWare, you get all Windows bugs plus maybe some bugs from VMWare.

That's quite different from Winelib, which is indeed a separate implementation of Win32 that may "lack" some Windows bugs.

Bullshit

[0x0d0a]

Use the Intel compilers, your code will be 50-300% faster.

50-300%? You're nuts. I've used both, and performance definitely varies...and if I had to choose one or the other as "generally producing faster code", I'd probably point at gcc.

Take a look at these benchmarks.

Gcc produces fastest code on 26 of the tests, icc on 9.

Furthermore, not all the optimization flags for gcc were being used (no idea why -fexpensive-optimizations wasn't used).

Re:WRONG!

[spinkham]

He was testing on a seperate machine, just wanted to avoid the hassle of transfering all the sources every time he wanted to compile.
Quote from article:

The transfer of source to an MS-Windows machine and the correction of filenames and text format issues have been avoided. Therefore, I can build the game from one machine, then I only have to copy the final chaos.exe to my MS-Windows machine to test.

Re:1.0 ?

[Papineau]

Before 1.0, let it reach 0.9 (0.8 was released circa 1994 or 1995). You can check the unofficial Wine 0.9 TODO for a list of features needed for the 0.9 milestone.

About the long development life... don't forget it started with Windows 3.1 as it's first target. Then, Win95, Win NT 4.0, Win98, WinME, Win 2K, Win XP came out. We're talking 2 different architectures (for some kind of operations at least), and some new features to implement at each version.

Also, the list of authors currently lists 557 different people (contributions vary from a one-liner to a complete architecture overhaul). The number of currently active developpers is of course way smaller, more along the lines of 30-50. Of those, the vast majority do it in their spare time. So a long development period is not an indication of a failure, since if it was nobody would work on it anymore.

The test cases (called conformance tests) try to verify that what Wine implements reacts the same way in Windows. Depending on the purpose of a test, it can be trivial or not, implemented in Wine or not yet. A whole lot of dlls don't have any test written for them yet, so yes, we need more test cases.

Or if your using Gecko

[bogie]

usercontent.css

*[src*='ads.'],
*[src*='/ad/'] ,
*[src*='/ads/'],
*[src*='/Ads/'],
*[src*='dou bleclick'],
*[src*='us.a1.yimg.com'],
*[src*='ad vertis'],
img[src^='http://images.slashdot.org/ba nner/'] {
display: none !important;
}

You can add whatever else you want there as well. Things like

/* this hides the usual 468x60 Flash banner ads */
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][wi dth="468"][height="60"] {
display: none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
}
/* this hides the not so usual but very annoying 728x90 Flash banner ads */
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][wi dth="728"][height="90"] {
display: none !important;
visibility: hidden !important;
}