Re: [Mingw-users] ingw32-make 3.80 does not accept anycommandlineargument

[Brian Dessent <brian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bo Yang wrote:

> 1. Does mingw runtime and msys runtime the same thing?

No.  In terms of describing the type of application, a "MinGW
application" is synonymous with a "native application" in that both
terms mean "a binary that is linked with MSVCRT.DLL" which is the C
runtime that comes with Windows.  It is quite limited in the APIs it
supports (mostly just the bare minimum required by ANSI C90) but it is
present on every Windows system so it requires no extra libraries be
distributed with the app.  This is where the "Minimal" aspect of *Min*GW
comes from.

The MSYS runtime is msys-1.0.dll and so by definition any app that links
with it (and not msvcrt.dll) is a "MSYS application".

> 2. What are the main functions of these two runtime? Provide C
> function of c's standard library? Of somethin more?

Mostly, yes.  On a *nix system it would be called libc.so.  On those
systems, libc provides the interface of the C standard library and maps
it onto the lower level kernel syscalls.  It is the same on Windows
except instead of kernel syscalls, the lower level interface is the
Win32 API (and occasionally the Native API.)  It would be possible (but
tedious) to write an app that only used the Win32 API and did not use
any C runtime, just like on *nix it is possible to skip the libc and
make direct kernel syscalls for all operations.  However in practice
nobody does this because you give up so much functionality.

> Both  runtime are dlls which contain the neccessary functions and
> emulate the POSIX APIs, right? Thanks!

Cygwin was created to make porting unix software easier.  It replaces
the native runtime with one that has much more capability, at least in
terms of what unix programmers would expect, to the point where most
*nix software compiles without modification.

MSYS is a fork of an old version of Cygwin, modified to account for
slightly different project goals and philosophies in mind, but still the
same general concept.

Brian

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