On 01/25/2013 04:08 AM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> On 01/24/2013 02:41 PM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> What advantages does mingw have over MSVC? Is it just that it is
>>> cost-free, or is it easier to use mingw than MSVC for someone used to
>>> building on Linux? (mingw certainly does not seem to have the
>>> advantage of being fast!)
>>
>> See Craig's email today about problems with SDKs and availabilty of
>> free 64 bit MSVC compilers.
>
> Also, some third party libraries are built with the Mingw compilers
> and it's often best not to switch if you can help it.
That's a trade-off; they're often not available in 64-bit, so you
usually land up needing to rebuild them for 64-bit anyway, and the mingw
64 bit toolchain seems to be a bit broken.
As for 64-bit MS compilers - at the moment the current MSVC 64-bit
compilers are available for free as cross-compilers. The rather bizarre
situation is that you have a 64-bit host OS running 32-bit compilers
under Wow64, producing 64-bit binaries as output. This seems to be quite
transparent to the build process when on a 64-bit host, as the host can
execute the cross-compiled binaries directly, so it isn't like a normal
cross-compile where you have to differentiate between host- and target-
executables.
So, while no native 64-bit compilers are available for free as part of
Visual Studio Express 2012 (11), it doesn't matter much. The issue is
more that it's very much Microsoft's whim whether they release compilers
at all and if so, which ones, when and how.
-- Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services