The Cygnus GNU Tools

The Cygnus GNU Tools

[Lance Kibblewhite]

It has been mentioned that the Win32 GNAT has been changed to work to
work the Cygnus GNU Tools for the next release.

What exactly does this mean?  What are the advantages of doing this?
What types of changes can we expect?

Does it mean for instance we will be required to LD rather then Link?
Will we still be able to integrate Gnat with the Visual C++ IDE? 

While the current integration of Gnat with NT/Win95 is ok, it still
has some rough edges. For example, it still uses environment symbols
rather the using the registry. There are difficulties hosting both GCC
and VC++ on the same system, and using both simultaneously, as in the
same project.

What impact does the use of the Cygnus Tools have on this?

-- Lance.

Re: The Cygnus GNU Tools

[Richard Kenner]

In article <326f6cd2.57938220@library.airnews.net> lance@eco.twg.com writes:
>It has been mentioned that the Win32 GNAT has been changed to work to
>work the Cygnus GNU Tools for the next release.
>
>What exactly does this mean?  What are the advantages of doing this?
>What types of changes can we expect?

The major change is that you will not require any tools other than those
which are distributed with Windows 95 or Windows NT to use GNAT.

>Does it mean for instance we will be required to LD rather then Link?

Since LD supports all the various styles of object files and GNAT
knows how to call it, it will be simpler to use LD.

>Will we still be able to integrate Gnat with the Visual C++ IDE? 

If you did before, nothing will change that.

>While the current integration of Gnat with NT/Win95 is ok, it still
>has some rough edges. For example, it still uses environment symbols
>rather the using the registry. There are difficulties hosting both GCC
>and VC++ on the same system, and using both simultaneously, as in the
>same project.
>
>What impact does the use of the Cygnus Tools have on this?

Not a whole not.  The major thing is that GNAT will be using a package
which is heavily being developed and worked on by a lot of people, so
as this package improves, certain aspects of GNAT will improve with it. 

The main goal of the Cygnus tools is to produe a full Unix-like
environment, including BASH, MAKE, and the other tools, on Windows 95
and Windows NT.  However, a set of WIN32API headers files are currently
being developed with it.  GNAT 3.08 supports linking with the Win32Ada
bindings.  Cygnus supplies .a files that correspond to all (or nearly all)
the Microsoft .LIB files.

Re: The Cygnus GNU Tools

[Bob Crispen]

Richard Kenner wrote:

>In article <326f6cd2.57938220@library.airnews.net> lance@eco.twg.com writes:
>>It has been mentioned that the Win32 GNAT has been changed to work to
>>work the Cygnus GNU Tools for the next release.
>>
>>What exactly does this mean?  What are the advantages of doing this?
>>What types of changes can we expect?

I ought to point out here that the change I've heard about is
one of *integrating* the Cygnus stuff with gnat.  I've been
using the Cygnus gnu shell (bash), sed, grep, etc., with gnat
for going on to a year now with few to no problems.  You can
do the same, but like me you'll need to use a different shell
(actually a different set of environment variables, but the
easiest way is to have two different parameterized shell
shortcuts) when you want to compile Ada and C++.  I imagine
we'll only need one shell in the future and perhaps only one
copy of the "gcc programs".

Bob Crispen
crispen@hiwaay.net