Re: call for help/crazy idea: nmake support

[Braden McDaniel]

On Tue, 2010-08-10 at 16:38 -0700, Natalie Tasman wrote: 
> Hi Ralf,
> 
> I think this is a great idea and would be interested in hearing your
> plans for moving forward.  I've invested a lot of time in an autotools
> build system that works on *nix and mingw (and cross-compiling to
> mingw from linux!) and I do think this would be interesting to see
> this work on mingw shell with MSVC's build system, as you propose.
> 
> Although, to be honest, I have recently been taking another look at
> other build systems such as cmake, which does generate full
> MSVC-native project files, which is very attractive.  I'm sure this is
> heresay, but I'll at least voice my interest in a dream solution:
> autotools with Visual Studio project file generation.

Part of the problem with Visual Studio project file generation is the
frequency with which the file format changes--sometimes a little,
sometimes a lot.  But every couple of years or so, something's likely to
change.

msbuild (of which I understand modern project file formats to be a
subset) might be a better target.  The long term stability of the file
format doesn't have much of a track record yet; but one can choose to be
optimistic.  It does deliver a command line build without a Bourne
shell, which I'm guessing is the major attraction of nmake.  But unlike
nmake, it has quite a few modern features.

> A related, possibly basic question: if mingw's gcc builds
> msvc-compatible DLLs, etc, what do people see as the benefit to using
> a mingw/sh-driven MSVC build?

Good enough for C; but if you wants to build a DLL with C++ interface
features, you generally still need to use the same compiler as other
code you're playing with.

-- 
Braden McDaniel <address@hidden>