Compiling Under Wine

Awesome by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-23 14:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

I can't wait til we have a fully functioning windows emulator. Even if it will kill the need for native apps (read games).

Re:Awesome by EvilSporkMan · 2003-02-23 14:58 · Score: 3, Informative

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

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Re:Awesome by SCHecklerX · 2003-02-23 14:58 · Score: 4, Interesting

Be careful what you wish for. It's excellent handling of Windoze apps is part of what killed OS/2. Developers: "Why port it when it can run the windoze version?"
Not exactly the same, but it would be much better to have native apps, as opposed to having to emulate/VM that other OS.
Re:Awesome by harlows_monkeys · 2003-02-23 15:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

Be careful what you wish for. It's excellent handling of Windoze apps is part of what killed OS/2. Developers: "Why port it when it can run the windoze version?"
I don't believe that this is actually true. Win95 had excellent Win3.x compatibility, but developers nevertheless rushed to develop Win95 software. Why would Win3.x compatibility in OS/2 cause developers to forego native development, but not have the same effect on Win95?
I believe that what really killed OS/2 was IBM's attitude toward developers. Microsoft made it trivial to get started in Win95 development. Hell, you could go into Egghead and buy an MSDN subscription and all the tools you needed.
Compare to OS/2, where you had to apply to IBM for permission to develop, and buy an expensive development kit (at least, to officially develop).
I believe it was Jerry Pournelle who wrote of his experiences at a trade show, where he went to the MS booth, and asked what he had to do to develop for the upcoming Win95, and they handed him, on the spot, a development kit. At the IBM booth, he asked what he had to do to develop for OS/2 (a system that was already for sale, unlike Win95, which was still in beta). Did they hand him a development kit? Nope. They handed an application. If they decided he was worthy, he'd be allowed to buy a development kit.
I think that is the reason OS/2 development never took off.
Note! I'm not saying for-pay developer programs necessarily kill a platform. Apple used to have a for-pay program, but it was a joy, because of the astounding support. You sent any question off to DTS, and they would quickly have a good engineer, with full access to the source and the developers, answer it. I was having trouble with interrupt handling in a device driver, and they send me the detailed comments from the ROM source code for the interrupt handler, which explained exactly what was going on.
With Apple DTS, the feeling I had as a developer was that I was dealing with my peers at Apple, who wanted to cooperate with me to make something great. With IBM, I always felt like an insignificant pawn in whatever they were doing.
Re:Awesome by flex0 · 2003-02-23 15:45 · Score: 3, Interesting

a) windows is, and will always be further along than wine. chasing an API puts you in second place, from the moment you start.
Sure. But developers don't use always the newest APIs with their untested buggy implementations.
Otherwise their products wont run on old machines. There are still many win98 boxes out there.
And MS still offers IE6 for win98.

And the fact that their software runs fine in wine could aswell attract them to not use the newest apis in near future.

b) vmware can run windows fine. it's not expensive, and it'll run most things better than wine ever will, if you want to actually get some work done (i used it for almost a year to do PCB design and circuit design using protel for uni, and this was on a celeron 366!)
Yes but you actually need a windows copy. This might scare vendors from shipping desktop boxes with linux preinstalled.
"Oh sure, you can run Windows apps, just buy it for $300"
c) killing games is stupid. you're just going to make linux less attractive to developers (who won't give too hoots that we need to bend over backwards to use wine, let alone attempt to get a proper port), and what with added cheat detection, wine will probably get marked as a "cheat" more and more often.
-> WineX?
d) i doubt wine will ever be fully useful for newer games. you're better off just supporting openGL in the first place, simply because wine will need to provide an directx wrapper around openGL anyway.
They already have one and it works. (WineX has got a better one tho)
i just don't see what's right about it. wine won't save you anything, except from RSI, since you won't be using it to do anything but watch games crash and run slowly.
Oh well, right now I'm down and uploading some stuff with eMule without any native dlls ... works flawless for me.

And this "slowly" is a myth.
Right now it might be a lil bit slower due to not optimized implementations but after all - Wine Is not aN Emulator.
Re:Awesome by Losat · 2003-02-23 15:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

I think you are refering to IBM's Developer Connection, which was a bit like MSDN. This was fee-based but may have been free if you met certain criteria. It seems like they also had a developer partner program, though I can't remember for sure.
However, there were certainly compilers and development kits just anyone could buy and use (no application to fill out, just buy the box).
Exmamples: IBM's own excellent C-Set/2 (C/C++ compiler) (later Visual Age C++); Watcom's excellent C/C++ compiler; Borland's C++ for OS/2; Two (yes two!) distributions of gcc (gcc2 and emx). There were also two "Turboish" Pascal compilers and three "Visual" Rexx packages (somewhat Visual Basic like but using the Rexx language).
Still, I do agree that IBM could have been more friendly to developers, and IBM certainly did enough things wrong with the marketing.

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Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-23 16:30 · Score: 2, Informative

Speaking from experience, there was a definite Kiss-The-Ring culture surrounding OS/2.

Back then, most IBM stuff could not be purchased retail and had to be procured through the sales channel (who was only interested in you if you were buying mainframes). Meanwhile, Microsoft was spamming CDs like crazy, figuring they would get paid eventually.
Re:Awesome by Qzukk · 2003-02-23 17:07 · Score: 3, Interesting

Oddly enough, BSD still lives despite the Linux binary compatibility.

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Re:Awesome by AvitarX · 2003-02-23 17:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

Ummm, it has.

Linux has far surpassed where OS/2 was, and is growing in use. Linux's total openness is a part of it's success (another part being it's freeness).

Linux has a large share of web servers. A large share of new super computer instellations. A large share new renderfarm instellations. A large share of scientific workstation instalations. A growing share in educational desktop installations. And a growing share in governmental type settings.

Linux is seriously taking off in a big way. It is HUGE and has far surpassed OS/2.

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Re:Awesome by vistas · 2003-02-23 17:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

Back in '84, I was the first person at the University of Georgia to get a Mac (I was one of the two campus-wide "microcomputer resources" at the time). For the two weeks that I had it (before a big-wig commandeered it) I BEGGED Apple for a development kit, compiler or *anything*.

"3000 smackers please" was the only comment I got out of Cuppertino.

So I kept playing on the PC with my $49 copy of Turbo Pascal, and my ~$200 copy of Lattice C. When MS dropped their Windows SDK from $900 to $300 in '88, I bit and basically never looked back.
Re:Awesome by rseuhs · 2003-02-23 20:11 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's excellent handling of Windoze apps is part of what killed OS/2.
Nonsense, OS/2 was killed because PC-makers didn't want to use an OS from a competitor.
"Why port it when it can run the windoze version?"
Great, so you would rather have them ask "Why port it at all when 100% of our customers use Windows?"
Not exactly the same, but it would be much better to have native apps,
Sure, but we have to get a significant amount of users first, then can we expect native apps.
Wine helps building that userbase.
Instead of developers asking "Why port it when it can run the windoze version?" we have to have users asking "Why use Windows when Linux can run Windows and Linux apps?".
Re:Awesome by rseuhs · 2003-02-23 20:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

a) windows is, and will always be further along than wine. chasing an API puts you in second place, from the moment you start.
Wrong. An API is by definition a fixed implementation that does not change at a later time. Of course there are additions, but those are not used until most of the userbase supports that extensions (which gives Wine a lot of time to incorporate those extensions).
Almost all Win32 software runs on Windows 98 (5 years old), most runs even on Windows95 (8 years).
b) vmware can run windows fine. it's not expensive, and it'll run most things better than wine ever will, if you want to actually get some work done (i used it for almost a year to do PCB design and circuit design using protel for uni, and this was on a celeron 366!)
Well, it *is* expensive. More expensive than Windows. And you still need Windows, too. And I did not even start to talk about the speed problems.
Also, it can't be incorporated with distributions, therefore distributions can't run Win32-apps "out of the box", but with a good Wine, they can.
c) killing games is stupid. you're just going to make linux less attractive to developers (who won't give too hoots that we need to bend over backwards to use wine, let alone attempt to get a proper port), and what with added cheat detection, wine will probably get marked as a "cheat" more and more often.
We have to build a userbase before expecting any native games. Without Wine, there will not be a gaming userbase, period. So Wine is the only way to make Linux a gaming platform.
Re:Awesome by andrewski · 2003-02-23 21:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

I would assert that there are more programs for Linux , or more accurately that can be compiled for it and that the api / libs /etc that it requires are supported, than there are for Windows. I would also assert that more innovation and research occurs for Linux than any other platform. I personally think it has in most ways that count surpassed Windows.

You can roll and smoke that.
Re:Awesome by afidel · 2003-02-23 22:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

Wrong. An API is by definition a fixed implementation that does not change at a later time.

Try to tell that to the folks in Redmond. MS has done a great diservice to the idea of object re-use, they often fail to follow one of the most basic ideas of OO, that is you can extend but never change an interface. Almost every single service pack changes the interfaces to dozens and dozens of parts of the windows api. This is why we have "dll hell". If MS followed basic principals it wouldn't be a problem because rather than reworking the interface they would simply add new additions to the interface and depricate the old ones (leaving the origional interface and associated code so that programs would still get the behaviour they expect).

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Re:Awesome by scrytch · 2003-02-24 04:41 · Score: 2, Insightful

So why hasn't Linux taken off yet?

Because good sized chunks of the development kit does not come with linux. Go browse the MSDN library CD, or browse it online. Check out the support for an object model that guarantees that any language the major compiler vendors put out, as well as a plethora of scripting languages, will be able to interface with it. I can script my mail app with everything from VB to python to C++. I am buried in more voluminous documentation than I will ever have time to read.

To say for a Linux dev environment "some assembly required" is to grievously understate the problem. The only thing a Linux environment has going for it in terms of documentation is a much bigger base of sample code.

It costs real money to put together a good development kit. But just ask Carmack why he prefers to develop on NT.

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ads by ldspartan · 2003-02-23 14:40 · Score: 3, Funny

I find it entertaining that when I went to read the comments, I got to see an article for Visual Studio .NET :).

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It is not recommended by YellowSnow · 2003-02-23 14:40 · Score: 5, Funny

that you compile under the influence of any type of alcahol

Re:It is not recommended by eclectro · 2003-02-23 14:51 · Score: 5, Funny

that you compile under the influence of any type of alcahol

but it's ok to post on slashdot???

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Re:It is not recommended by Pseudonym · 2003-02-23 15:44 · Score: 4, Funny

Don't drink and derive?

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Re:It is not recommended by powerlinekid · 2003-02-23 16:50 · Score: 3, Funny

I don't know... I've written some good code while piss drunk. I think the key is that while sober you sometimes get bogged down in doing it The Right Way (tm) where a simple ugly block of code would be better. My code may not be readable the next day but it works :).

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Re:It is not recommended by JohnFluxx · 2003-02-23 19:57 · Score: 2, Funny

Agreed! Otherwise you might write a game that looks really good and you think is working... until you sober up the next morning..not that I've ever done that.

which begs the question by b17bmbr · 2003-02-23 14:42 · Score: 2, Funny

does microsoft compile windows under wine?

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Re:which begs the question by bstadil · 2003-02-23 14:54 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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Re:which begs the question by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-23 15:04 · Score: 2, Funny

Linux now has a new meaning. Linux is now the name of the entire operating system, not just the kernel. This is common usage. It doesn't matter what the older correct version is.
Re:which begs the question by fredrik70 · 2003-02-23 15:11 · Score: 5, Informative

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)

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Re:which begs the question by critter_hunter · 2003-02-23 17:19 · Score: 2, Insightful

Don't like their STL? Use STLPort! Bonus points if you can compile it under Windows using their incredibly sucky installation instructions, which sorta ... stop in the middle of the process.

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Re:which begs the question by Daengbo · 2003-02-24 00:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'm not going to argue with you about whether it really means what you say or not, because those above have done that already, but I will say that he CAN NOT be using it incorrectly, for the following reason: your usage is idiomatic, while his is not. Translation -- your meaning is not the sum of the parts, while beg (ask for) a question, certainly holds to the literal meaning. Whatever the idiom means or has come to mean, it can not displace the literal meaning. A good example would be "give a hoot," (my girlfriend recommends it), as in "I don't give a hoot what you think." It can certainly mean to literally shout, if I care to make it that. Fantastically, unbelievably, and amazingly, while not idioms, can be used in the literal meanings of those words, despite the fact that common usage dictates otherwise.
Regarding the use of loose and lose referred to above, they are not a common American problem, and mispellings such as these almost certainly spring from a lack of daily reading.

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Re:which begs the question by awol · 2003-02-24 02:19 · Score: 2, Informative

VC7 is just broken. Wait for the first service pack. We had to rearrange header files _and_ install the unreleased patch from MS just to get some code to compile (code that compiled find under, g++ (HP-UX, Linux, SunOS), aCC (HP-UX), CC (SunOS) and VC6).

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Big deal! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-23 14:44 · Score: 2, Funny

Let me tell you something, I've compiled not only under wine, but on vodka, whiskey, shit even ACID. And when I was on acid, my monitor tried to eat me...

compiling? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-23 14:44 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's not so interesting to me that he managed to compile using VC++ under WINE. VC++ doesn't call any of the APIs you code, it just puts machine code into the file saying you can call them if you want. It's all well and good to have VC++ compile DX9_CreateSurface() (or whatever) into a bunch of PUSHs, POPs and a JMP instruction, but that doesn't help if WINE can't actually call that function when you're testing. It makes more sense to me to use Bochs or VMWare to test your application if you're developing on multiple platforms. Anything less would be short-changing your Windows clients.

GNU/translation by phoebe · 2003-02-23 14:45 · Score: 2, Funny

GNU/Build GNU/natively GNU/on GNU/a GNU/computer GNU/using GNU/a MS-Windows/compiler GNU/without GNU/a MS-Windows/computer!

Re:GNU/translation by kfg · 2003-02-23 16:41 · Score: 2, Funny

I know my cat likes to sleep on my keyboard. I'm just trying to figure out how she managed to post to Slashdot.

And better than some of mine too.

Funny thing is that I don't recall giving her a user account, so she's either stolen my password or rooted my box. And she looks so innocent sleeping over the sofa.

Guess my momma was right when she warned me felines were devious little fuzzballs.

(No, she's not named after the Friends character. She's named after Phoebe Snow. No, not the singer, the "train babe." Sheesh.)

KFG

Compiling under wine eh? by trotski · 2003-02-23 14:48 · Score: 2, Funny

Last time I tryed to compile something under the influence of (way too much) wine, I ended up on the floor infront of my computer. All I remember was waking up to a formatted hard drive; compiling under the influence of wine sucks!

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Re:Compiling under wine eh? by delta407 · 2003-02-23 15:53 · Score: 2, Funny

All I remember was waking up to a formatted hard drive
Would you prefer to wake up to an unformatted hard drive?

WRONG! by www.sorehands.com · 2003-02-23 14:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

It may eliminate the need for a reasonably fast machine to develop on, but you always need a target machine for testing! But, the test machine should be slow so that one can find performance bottlenecks and see the program operate under non-optimal conditions.

If the people are forced to test applications on slow machines, we may not have word processors that need 40MB of ram and a 933MHZ pentium III to run.

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Re:WRONG! by spinkham · 2003-02-23 15:50 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Re:WRONG! by Jah-Wren+Ryel · 2003-02-23 16:05 · Score: 4, Funny

Duh! If it compiles it must be fine! What kind of newbie developer are you?

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Re:WRONG! by bluGill · 2003-02-24 02:21 · Score: 2, Informative

It does not require a slow machine to find performance bottlenecks, it requires a fast machine! Anyone who wants to improve the preformance of code needs a profiler to find those places, but profilers slow down your code themselves, so you need a faster machine to get the same speed. In theory you can find the slow spots on a slow machine, but you are wasting a lot of time, a fast machine can find the slow areas in the code faster.
That isn't to say you never run on a slow machine, but if you determin it isn't fast enough on a slow machine you need the fast machine to find those slow areas.
If you try to improve performance without a profiler you waste your time optimising parts of code that are plenty fast, while often ignoring the part of code that is the problem.
One man I know optimised every line in his program that was too slow, and got a 1% speed improvement. After that he used a profiler and discovered his program was spending 60% of its time doing arctangents, which is done in the library and was optimised by smarter people than him. Excpet they assumed you would build a bridge with their function so they used newton's mythod to get about 15 decimal places of accuracy. His program didn't need that much acuracy, in fact the first thing it did after getting the arctangent was chop off everything after the decimal place. By implimenting his own arctanget he was about to get his program to spend 2% of the time doing arctangent, and the program ran twice as fast. However without a profiler he could never have discovered the problem.

Visual C++ under WINE by kruetz · 2003-02-23 14:52 · Score: 5, Interesting

Wine has really come a long way to facilitate running major applications such as Visual C++. Features that "just work" often do not get mentioned because there is nothing to say. Wine has many excellent features like this. However, I have expressed the problems with Wine currently and I expect that in a potential follow up article many of these will be resolved. Wine has been in development for over a decade now. As it is finally nearing a 1.0 release, I see how much better it was than the 1.0 release of MS Windows.

Using Visual C++ on GNU/Wine gives me all the benefits of being able to develop a 100% compatible MS-Windows version of the game, while saving me the time of maintaining another Win2k machine version of the source and moving to that machine to compile. It has been a great time saver for me and I strongly expect this information will be very useful to myself and others in the future.

Okay, so you can use Visual C++ compiler under WINE. Is that terribly surprising when WINE can run MS-Office for the most part? The compiler takes the source files and libraries and produces an executable or library. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't think that too much of this would involve heavy usage of the Win32API, much less the lesser-used and less-tested-under-WINE parts. For the most part, the compiler would be doing tokenising, parsing, translation and optimisation, which would in all likelihood use no external libraries or anything.

I don't mean to rubbish this article, I'm just saying that I don't see it as being terribly surprising. On the other hand, I think this is a great use of WINE and is definitely more innovative that anythin I would use WINE for. And as he says in the article, there was a lot of fiddling around with command line arguments and environment variables. But if you're compiling from the command-line under Windows, it's just as bad (no, really).

A much greater "victory" for WINE would be to have the whole VisualStudio ensemble running. But I'm not sure if this is feasible, especially in the short-term. By "victory" I don't mean something along the lines of "Linux now allows you to run a quality IDE", because KDevelop and Eclipse are great IDEs. Instead, VisualStudio and Office are probably the most complicated pieces of software written by MS (excluding Windows itself) and for WINE to be able to run them both as if they were running under Windows would be truly a fantastic achievement.

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Re:ads - I dont see em :) by jgaynor · 2003-02-23 14:54 · Score: 2, Offtopic

I don't see me - just set ads.doubleclick.net to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file. Granted thats not the only host you have to add, but there are regularly maintained lists out there of good people to block :).

Re:such a deal by chunkwhite86 · 2003-02-23 14:58 · Score: 2, Funny

You know (shaking the finger of logic and wisdom), if they (MS) sold such a product for the GNU environment for a couple hundred bucks...I would buy it.

Too bad it'll never happen. I'm sure if such a project began within MS, Bill (or some exec) would scream "Heresy!". Remember, a win for GNU = a loss for MS in most cirsumstances.

Providing, of course, it didn't totally suck!

MS Sales Rep: "Well Sir, "doesn't suck" wasn't listed as one of your product requirements... Sorry, no refunds!"

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Windows Compliant / Posix Compliant Drivers by PetoskeyGuy · 2003-02-23 15:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'm a programmer for a Supplier of Software to the US Government and we are actively looking to port our products to Linux do to the strong interest from our clients. Specific Offices decide what products they want to implement and how to do it. We are investigating Emulating Windows as an one solution.

I look forward to the days when any program that is Windows Compliant runs on any platform that supports the Windows API.

That being said, the real problem I have is DRIVERS for my hardware working under Linux. If someone could emulate Windows enough to use standard Windows Drivers, there would be no more reason to use Windows at all. I truly commend those braves souls and companies who write drivers for Linux.

Now if there was a Proxy that accepted Microsoft SQL requests and sent them to a PostgreSQL backend transparently we would be free of the beast and save the Tax Payers lots of money paying my paycheck, plus blow our competiters out of the water. :o)

Re:Windows Compliant / Posix Compliant Drivers by hazman · 2003-02-23 16:01 · Score: 2, Funny

Hey, you know, if there is anybody who could pull off this Hardware Abstraction Emulation stuff, it'd be those sharp critters over at Connectix.....what's that, they were acquired by Microsoft?. Never mind.
Re:Windows Compliant / Posix Compliant Drivers by gregfortune · 2003-02-23 22:53 · Score: 2, Informative

Doesn't Postgres have an ODBC driver? Any reason why you aren't using it?

GNU! by Dunkalis · 2003-02-23 15:02 · Score: 3, Funny

Wow! So RMS wants us to simply call it GNU now? Dropping the Linux part altogether? Sorta hypocritical to me ;).

Or do you run Hurd? Which is technically the GNU OS.

The above is meant to be funny.

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GNU computer? by arvindn · 2003-02-23 15:03 · Score: 2, Funny

Does this guy really use the HURD, or is it just that he's an RMS mega-fan?

CVS by YoJ · 2003-02-23 15:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

The author describes the problem he originally solves as being the pain of moving code between Linux and Windows, losing attributes, case problems, etc. The approach I take is to keep all code in CVS on my file server. I do compiling and editing on my personal computer; both Linux and Windows can handle CVS. This way you have to reboot into Windows for the Windows compile, but never have to worry about copying files or case changes.

Re:CVS by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-23 15:39 · Score: 2, Interesting

Yea, that was my thought. I never copy any source files between any computers, just 'cvs up'. From his article, it sounds like he doesn't use any source control, so my guess he's never worked on a project with other people or shipped any heavily used software. Both require the ability to co-ordinate source code changes and manage releases from a baseline...not to mention a single place to do backups.

I've been coding Java for a while now, but back in my C/C++ days, I only used the M$ command line tools. They integrate pretty well with a unix-style command line build system. The reverse isn't true.

I use Wine to compile but not for porting by Captain+Rotundo · 2003-02-23 15:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

I use Microchip's pic assemler through wine, for a small piece of code I maintain that runs on a PIC that wasn't supported by any GNU/Linux assembler when I started. I also maintain a legacy version of a very specific proprietary MSDOS (actually we run DRDOS) program that was written with Borland C, hopefully I will be replacing the last running bit of that with a DJGPP compiled version soon, which of course can be cross compiled on GNU/Linux without the need for Wine and bcw.
I know what your thinking, but when a piece of software has worked flawlessly (well almost!) for 15 or so years, and is 'mission critical' it is very hard to drop a platform and move on. I am hoping to try out a move to Linux some day in the near future so that I can take advantage of new features and things that just arent available for DOS. But unless I can convince everyone else of the benefits I may be supporting dos for quite some time (I am the only software person at this company).

1.0 ? by IanBevan · 2003-02-23 15:16 · Score: 4, Interesting

I'm curious, what exactly will the "milestone" of version 1.0 of Wine actually mean ? I would doubt that it'll ever be 100% compatible with Windows 98/XP. So what feature list is the development team trying to complete before calling it 1.0 ?

I think that pretty much any other product would have been deemed a failure if it had endured a 10 year development life and not reached version 1.0. Unless of course we're talking about Duke Nukem Forever...

My experience of Wine is common to most people's I think; it looks like a great idea, but as soon as you try to run any non-trivial program, it simply locks up/doesn't work. I've looked at their website and looked at all the "passed" indicators on their test cases. That doesn't help me run my apps much though... do they need more test cases ? Are they simply too abstract ??

Just my $0.02 worth

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Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.

Re:1.0 ? by Papineau · 2003-02-23 16:19 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:1.0 ? by wolverine1999 · 2003-02-23 21:33 · Score: 2, Informative

I managed to get Virtualdub to run but it did not work correctly. Hope they fix this. I hope they get some applications like Tmpgenc to work too.

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SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
Re:1.0 ? by IamTheRealMike · 2003-02-23 21:37 · Score: 2, Informative

I'm curious, what exactly will the "milestone" of version 1.0 of Wine actually mean ?
It's mostly purely technical targets, for instance the wineserver protocol will be frozen, which means that (I think) you can build WineLib apps and upgrade Wine and they won't break. There are a few other targets, mostly esotoric.
Wine 0.9 is far more interesting, and will hopefully come out in the last part of 2003. It's focussed on being easy to use and setup.
A lot of problems people have with Wine are usually related to it being badly setup. Partly that's our fault, Wine isn't especially easy to setup right, and because it releases every month, distro packages are often out of date (and now redhat doesn't even ship it anymore). After being increasingly frustrated with Wine, I tried CrossOver (a slightly hacked up version of wine designed to be easy to use), and it worked so well I was blown away. Installing IE6 in Wine is a distinctly wierd experience :)
Anyway, I've been using WineHQ wine for quite some time now, but hopefully along with proper setups (DON'T use your pre-existing windows installation etc) Wine will get a much better reputation.

This is non-news. by Doomrat · 2003-02-23 15:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

Visual C++ doesn't do anything weird regarding Windows API. The IDE is a normal affair, and the compiler could be run without a user interface. It's really not testing Wine to it's limitations and the irony of situation is barely worth commenting on. This is non-news, the only thing this article achieves is to make Slashdot look like the anti-MS geeks with limited social awareness. Some things just aren't worth giggling at.

I don't even need to look at the poster to know that this is the work of micheal...

Re:No! No! No! by njchick · 2003-02-23 15:31 · Score: 3, Informative

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 by 0x0d0a · 2003-02-23 15:34 · Score: 3, Informative

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).

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May we never see th

Re:Bullshit by Ramadog · 2003-02-23 16:22 · Score: 2, Informative

Furthermore, not all the optimization flags for gcc were being used (no idea why -fexpensive-optimizations wasn't used).
With gcc when using -O2 and up -fexpensive-optimzations is automatically turned on
Try using gcc -v -Q -O2 a.c to see what options are turned on. The file a.c has to exist.
Re:Bullshit by bm_luethke · 2003-02-23 17:30 · Score: 4, Interesting

Not neccessarily the most fair test. First the test were ran on an athlon system. Intel compilers optimized mostly based on the Intel architecture.

For example, we ran several benchmarks at work on three computers with gcc 3.1 and the intel compilers. Basically gcc and intel were fairly equal on the pIII xeons (intel had the edge). Gcc was somewhat faster on the athlon 700, and the intel compilers blew gcc away on our p4 2.4 ghz.

So what conclusions can you make? neither intel or gcc are better than the other. As we expected it depends on several factors - one of the main is hardware (wow, who woulda thunk hardware affects optimization :) ). In fact on the P4's with multi-threaded floating point operations we saw well over 300%, none of the tests were worse than 100% faster. On the athlon Gcc was slightly better except in one case were it was signifigantly faster. Eventually we found that gcc 2.x or 3.x does not have good p4 optimization yet (we asked on the devel lists trying to get better numbers as we didn't want to pay for the intel compilers). Of course this was about 6-10 months ago so they could have gotten optimizations in by now.

If I had to choose one or the other as "generally producing faster code" I would ask "what hardware are we talking about". And that GREATLY influences the answer.

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------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Re:Bullshit by bm_luethke · 2003-02-23 20:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

no, the safest bet is to optimize around intel. A large portion of machines are intel. The numbers show that a programed optimised for an intel run pretty good in athlon, athlon optimized run crappy on intel. Gcc will only optimize for PIII's and below well. P4 optimizations also run pretty good (that is close to the optimized veriosn for them) on pIII's and below and athlons. Thus the safest "bet" would be to optimize around the P4 (as pIII vs p4 optimizations may make only 5-10% on a pIII/athlon but 100-300% on a p4 this is even more true).

Should the gcc people optimize well for the p4 (and they will) then I will say the bet goes back with them. Of course this is assuming that the only thing to worry about is speed of generated code (which in many cases is not the most important).

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------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it

Even a man who's pure of heart by YellowSnow · 2003-02-23 16:10 · Score: 5, Funny

and uses the preview right
can turn to a troll
when the typos roll
and the bottle is empty and light

This sounds really lame. by NynexNinja · 2003-02-23 16:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

Next you will have some moron compiling under vmware or bochs or plex86. If you don't care about the abstraction or the 60% degradation in performance, and the fact that you have to rewrite all your make files to use vc++ nmake, this is for you. Its a convoluted mess IMHO. Using cross gcc for win32 on linux is a much cleaner way of doing this.

Or if your using Gecko by bogie · 2003-02-23 16:32 · Score: 3, Informative

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; }

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If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch

Re:Or if your using Gecko by trezor · 2003-02-24 00:55 · Score: 2, Informative

Or just a browser supporting CSS and user-css in genereal.

No need for a gecko, when a Viking will do :)

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Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.

GNU/WINE?!?! by Arandir · 2003-02-23 16:51 · Score: 2, Insightful

What the fsck is "GNU/WINE"! Aaargh! It's one thing to give RMS some credit, but this reeks of puerile toadying in an effort to look sophisticated in front of other juvenile sycophants.

Repeat after me, "WINE is not a GNU project!"

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A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned

Re:License Violation? by Jimithing+DMB · 2003-02-23 16:56 · Score: 2, Interesting

Oh please. Yeah, let's all cower in fear of Microsoft. Let's stop what we're doing because Microsoft might not like it. Let's always worry about being sued.

It might be a very real possibility, but it's one you should never worry about, just be aware of. It's as bad as terrorism, it only works if the target becomes terrified.

I do this with a DSP compiler by statusbar · 2003-02-23 16:56 · Score: 2, Interesting

The Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio for the TMS 6701 DSP is only available for windows. For this project everything else is compiled for Linux-386 as well as embedded Linux-PPC.

Running the command line tools under wine works fine, and now I am able to have one intel linux box compile all the DSP and PPC firmware as well as the Linux GUI code in a cron job from the daily cvs snapshots.

Doing this has made things SO much nicer. I would prefer if TI had a linux version of their DSP compiler, and will continue to pester them for one, but in the meantime WINE saves the day and allows me to NOT run windows for weeks on end!

My Win2000 anti-uptime is around 3 weeks now. I am weaning myself off windows!

Running command line tools like compilers is one of the EASIEST things for WINE to do - All they have to do is read and write files and allocate memory.

Biggest hassle for me: having to make special sed scripts to deal with mixed case file names in the auto-generated makefile dependency list that are incorrect since the compiler assumes case insensitive filesystems.

--jeff++

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ipv6 is my vpn

weird... by dolson · 2003-02-23 17:06 · Score: 5, Funny

You don't need Wine if you know what you're doing...

dana@digory:battlepong$ make
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c sound.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c collide.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c ball.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c game.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c menu.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c player.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c randgen.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c init.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c main.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` sound.o collide.o ball.o game.o menu.o player.o randgen.o init.o main.o -o bpong -lm `sdl-config --libs` -lSDL_image -lSDL_ttf -lSDL_mixer
dana@digory:battlepong$ file bpong
bpong: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.2.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
dana@digory:battlepong$ make clean
rm -rf *.o bpong
dana@digory:battlepong$ sh cross-make.sh
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c sound.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c collide.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c ball.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c game.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c menu.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c player.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c randgen.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c init.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` -c main.cpp
g++ `sdl-config --cflags` sound.o collide.o ball.o game.o menu.o player.o randgen.o init.o main.o -o bpong -lm `sdl-config --libs` -lSDL_image -lSDL_ttf -lSDL_mixer
dana@digory:battlepong$ file bpong
bpong: MS Windows PE Intel 80386 GUI executable not relocatable

It's MAGIC.

Re:So you're saying my vi clone. . . by bofkentucky · 2003-02-23 17:23 · Score: 4, Funny

what is your project's name...emacs *ducks for asbestos-lined safe room*

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09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

heh... wine... by doooras · 2003-02-23 18:23 · Score: 2, Funny

i prefer to compile under rum

*hic*

Re:I hope you PAID for the VC++ compiler by cdn-programmer · 2003-02-23 19:46 · Score: 3, Interesting

I paid for lots of operating systems too. I have 2 versions of OS/2, 2 versions of DOS, windows 95 and 98, 3 copies of NT 4.0 and a copy of 3.51 and a copy of w2k that I got stuck with because it didn't work and I had to refund the client's money. Microsoft would not refund what I paid them. Microsoft would not allow me to either return or exchange the unopened copies of Windows NT 4.0 either. I was a Microsoft dealer at the time and bought a 3 pack - which was about a month before w2k was announced. So I got stuck... then stuck again with w2k.

I have only one computer that runs windows NT so only one of these operating systems is in use.

I have red hat linux 6.1 server edition, OpenBSD 3.0 and Mandrake 8.1. I paid for all these too even though they are free.

Now, my desktop runs Debian and it is just great and I did a net install. Guess what, I don't know how to upgrade that RH 6.1 machine. Sure I can reformat the hard drive - but it contains a LOT of my work and I don't want to lose it. With Debian, an upgrade is easy.

In addition to this I bought 2 copies of Brief and I can't use it even though it is my favorite editor. I did a trial d/l of CRiSP and it is a wonderful editor, fully Brief compatible. I contacted them about licencing. I run 8 machines in my home and am a member of the local Unix users group and do consulting work. The CRiSP people told me I would need a "Licence Manager"! I decided to learn Emacs. It has a CRiSP mode and is looking better every day.

I bought 3 versions of M$ FTN and copies of M$ C as well. The last version of M$ FTN was such a botch that I could not use it. I have the Borland OS/2 C/C++ compiler. It was so broken I didn't use it.... but I paid for it. I have Borland C++ professional builder 4. I want to do C/C++ cross platform development.

I phoned Borland. I think they told me that I can buy Delphi for Linux. I think they told me that the language is supported on both platforms but that the API is different. The person on the other end of the phone didn't seem too knowledgable. So I am going into wxWIndows or gtk because these people actually SAY they are cross platform. Thus, I do not have any C++ builder code and didn't get my money's worth.

I have 4 versions of Oracle - paid for by the taxpayer (because I am one of their developers). The DOS versions were so bad we couldn't use them on that platform. The OS/2 versions were better but still not good enouf. It is not possible to install 8i for red hat 6.1 (even though that is the version oracle says 8I is for) unless you CAN STAND ON YOUR HEAD and read the paper What you need to knwo before you even THINK of installing oracle 8i . Imagine having to backdate the glibC and install an old version of Java from blackstrap just so you can get the installer to work. Why couldn't Oracle have put their developers into a room with 2 cd sets. One set - an off the shelf shrink wrapped copy of Red Hat 6.1, and the other set - a copy of the 8i source tree. And then make sure they don't have INTERNET access so they can't cheat and create a version that you can't install. Leave them there until they solve the problem or rot to death trying!!! Damit. I have lost MONTHS of my life solving other people's problems.

Guess what, I am porting the client's apps over to PostgreSQL. See ya Oracle!!! Goodbye!

So, of all the software I bought most of it did the job for a precious short time or didn't do the job at all - with the exception of Brief - which was just excellent. And what happened to Brief? Borland bought the rights, put it on the shelf and AFAIK I can't buy it any more.

So frankly I really don't care if that copy of VB ++ was paid for. Even if it wasn't, I do not feel M$ was ripped off . I feel I was ripped off.

I have been ripped off Over and Over and Over because I bought these products in good faith and paid for them with my hard earned money. Now I can't use them. Some never did what they were advertised to do. Others were discontinued and I lost out.

Let me tell you about the 2nd last copy of M$ FTN that I purchased. I found a bug where the conpiler just eliminated an "IF" statement. No errors, no warnings, and no machine instructions either. I filed a bug report with M$ with sample code. Months went by. I re-filed the bug. Months went by. Finally I phoned them and sat on wait for like an hour - and paid for this too. The rep told me the bug was fixed in the new version. So I bought it.

When the new version arrived I tried out the sample code from the bug report. The problem was still there. Oh, and the last version I bought couldn't be used it was so bad. The client dropped PC development ideas and switched to SUN.

What the Open Source movment has done is a refreshing breath of fresh air and IMHO it is the ONLY way that the programmers of the future are going to stand any chance of avoiding the endentured servant trap that closed source software creates. Anyone questioning this should realise that in order to use closed source software they have to agree to the licence terms and these are arbitrary and non-negotiable. If you find the terms unacceptable then you can't be a programmer. That is unless you can find the tools and the infrastructure you need elsewhere.

Well, we programmers are being attacked another way now.... patent law. If this gets too well established we won't be allowed to be independant. We'll have to work for a big company that has managed to negotiate cross licensing. Either that or pay the piper each time we want to go to the can.

Water flows down hill and the infrasructure required to build some of the closed source tools, like Windows NT/2K/XP, or Oracle or JAVA or say a compiler suite like Visual C++ or Borland Professional Builder is so great that it looks like an ocean. Oceans are hard to move. Oceans are also hard to re-create. There is no way that any company could recreate from scratch an operating system like XP. The environment that XP grew out of no longer exists. IBM tried and failed.

Over the years all computer companies with the exception of perhaps IBM,HP,M$ have failed. Who here thinks Microsoft will survive into the year 2050? Gates won't be in charge then. Who here thinks that another company is going to loom up that can invest the BILLIONS in infrastructure required to create an alternative?

The future of software has to be opensource because that is the only way for us programmers to ensure that we will have the tools we need and the right to use them.

If I add up the THOUSANDS I have spent on software over the years it illustrates to me that I should have been looking for better solutions a long time ago.

Re:No! No! No! by Tony-A · 2003-02-23 20:53 · Score: 2, Funny

Seems like there have been some reports that Microsoft Windows is more stable under VMWare than on the bare metal. It does make sense that the virtualized system as presented by VMWare is more regular and less messy than the bare metal.

Yes, but. The bugs taken individually won't show up. It's when they get together (and breed or something) that you get troubles.

Actually by Sycraft-fu · 2003-02-23 23:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

I think if you are serious about cross platform development, you need to have a native install of all the platforms you intent to port to. Either multi-boot or seperate boxes. Why? Well amy emulator, WINE espically but even VMWare, has certian quirks and differences that native hardware does not. You need to test it as it will be run to be sure. Also, if you are using any advanced 3d function, the emulators are going to fall flat on their faces.

If I were really serious about a commercial cross platform release, say Windows and Linux I think I would want a ton of testing. I'd probably want at least 3 different systems, all tht had a copy of Windows 98, ME, 2k, and XP plus at least 3 big Linux distros. While in theory something complied for any hardware under any verison of Windows should work on any other, it's just not the case. Same for Linux. You want to test for the little "gotchas" if you want to make sure you have a really stable software.

Dosemu 1.0 by tbspit · 2003-02-24 00:37 · Score: 2, Funny

When Dosemu reached 1.0, usage of DOS had become very low. So let us hope for a Wine 1.0 soon:)

Re:wow by crath · 2003-02-24 00:58 · Score: 4, Interesting

Now this is impressive. Things like this are what WINE should be all about. Amazing.

I disagree, it's depressing not impressive:

The author first asserts that the process of moving files between the systems causes the upper/lower caseness of the filenames to be munged; however, the text later talks about how his personal preference for file casenames is all lower and so he changes them. There is nothing in his "transfer between Linux & Windows" scenario that causes the case names to be wrong. The real issue is simply that his personal preference for filenames differs from that of the original author of the source code.
The author displays no knowledge of the network mounting of filesystems using SAMBA (CIFS) or NFS. This would have been a far better method and while it too would have slowed down compiles on the machine mounting the filesystem he states that he is not unhappy with such a slowdown.
Why isn't the source code checked into a configuration management tool, like CVS? What the article should have been describing was the process he followed checking the application into CVS, making his personal preference changes, checking in those updates, and then checking it back out onto both platforms and performing the compiles there---with no compile slowdowns.
As others have already noted elsewhere, he will still have to test on the target platform. Those who argue that VMWare is as good as a native boot-up for testing are simply displaying their ignorance and inexperience: display and network problems are often induced by a change in hardware platform, and VMWare is a distinct hardware platform from a testing perspective. While testing on VMWare is useful, it is not sufficient: a Windows application should be tested on several different hardware platforms as part of its formal QA.

In summary, while the article probably accurately describes the author's actions, there is nothing in his account that others should be emulating. More experienced developers should be consulted in the search for best practices.

I write this as someone who has done software development for almost 20 years; more than 20 if you count my high school years as a computer hobbiest.

Safe performance by fizbin · 2003-02-24 03:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

The safest bet is to not have your job depend on tweaking the last little bit of performance out of a customer's machine when you have only a vague idea of which platform they might be running on. Either improve your algorithms in the whole, or hide the slow performing code in a place where the user won't notice. (if possible)

That said, another option is to isolate the performance-critical sections into chunks of code which get optimized separately and then have cpu-detection code choose the appropriate chunk at runtime. The debian atlas packages do something like this, though (AFAIR) they use hand-optimized assembly instead of just using compiler flags and/or different compilers. (and yes, you can have both the sse- and 3dnow-optimized packages installed on the same machine, and the code will load the appropriate shared library at runtime)

Then, instead of standardizing on a compiler, you'll need to standardize on a build system that will let you compile the code as you need it compiled.

You are ignorant. by Tord · 2003-02-24 05:10 · Score: 2, Insightful

Your dissection of the authors knowledge is strongly flawed.

The author first asserts that the process of moving files between the systems causes the upper/lower caseness of the filenames to be munged

This is the case, I've run into this problem myself many times and it has little to do with how the files are saved and much to do with how fs-drivers are implemented and configured. Compare to how you often end up with read-only files if you copy them from a CD in Linux. Sure you can change some settings, but then often get other side-effects in other situations (goes for both). I believe he is the original author of his project.

The author displays no knowledge of the network mounting of filesystems using SAMBA (CIFS) or NFS.

The fact that he is dual-booting strongly suggests that he (like most of us) only has one development machine, not a complete network of machines. Don't get ignorant just because you are better equipped.

Why isn't the source code checked into a configuration management tool, like CVS?

Once again, he only has one workstation, thus is CVS out of the question since it needs to be hosted under one of the OSes and he can only run one at once. Besides, CVS is in most cases just unnecessary and complicates and slows stuff down if you are the single developer. You can make backups through normal file copying.

As others have already noted elsewhere, he will still have to test on the target platform.

Which I'm sure he does now and then too (by dual booting). However, if you just need to do some minor change in platform independent code it's really a bliss to not need to dual-boot.

Besides, your criticism of using VMWare for testing is quite irrelevant. It's true you need to test on multiple environments to know that it works on them all, but as you said, VMWare with Windows X *IS* one of these environments. If he's dual booting he only has access to one environment anyway, using VMWare as well will add one or more extra testing environments.

I would have LOVED to have a similar setup as his when I was developing BladeEnc. Like him I only had one development machine (couldn't afford more) and constantly needed to dual-boot in order to recompile and package a new version. The platform dependent parts of BladeEnc were very limited and untouched for 95% of the development, thus this setup + testing under wine (for possible quality degradation due to compiler excentricities) would have been more than enough during most of my days. Only performance tweaking would have to be done in windows environment.

With your 20+ years as software developer you obviously have found your way of working in your projects and with your budget. Don't knock others creative solutions for solving their problems with their resources in a totally different situation.

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