What is the appropriate Unix-POSIX based tool chain to use in Windows

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Let's say I have retrieved some C/C++ original and unmodified distribution libraries that were specifically designed for the Unix-POSIX based environments where the original developers who designed their code wrote them specifically for their environments - systems and these libraries originally are not portable to modern Windows systems.

What I would like to be able to do is to at the least build the needed static or dynamic libraries to be able to link them against my own Visual Studio projects.

I know that with Mingw(clang) you only need the MSVC run-time libraries as it doesn't have any need of the POSIX dll dependencies as it uses the Win32 libraries directly. However, it doesn't have all of the Unix environment features that Cygwin(gcc/g++) does and for any C/C++ code that relies on native POSIX functionality such as fork(), mmap(), etc. would have to be re-implemented into the Win32 equivalents for proper compilation, linking, and running of the application.

With Cygwin I'm more exposed to nearly all of the Unix-POSIX features with a little higher learning curve and to integrate these libraries that are built by Cygwin's compiler(s), they would rely on cygwin1.dll to be able to run on a Windows machine.

A Primary Example:

The current libraries that I'm trying to build to work with Visual Studio are GNU's: GMP, MPIR, MPFR, MPFRC++.

So far I have successfully been able to build MPIR in Visual Studio 2017 with the aid of Pythonand Windows version of Yasm. However, when trying to build MPFR it requires the dependency of GMP. So now I have to build GMP.

I could use Mingw to build GMP which may be in some ways a little easier, but by using Gygwin and building GMP through the Unix/Linux/POSIX environment I would be exposing myself to the functionality of Unix/POSIX systems.

Note - I'm primarily familiar with Windows environments and until recently have never worked with or on any Unix based OS. So there is a bit of a learning curve for me. I'm doing all the research and reading that I can on my own which is not a problem. It provides good experience with every bit of trial and error.

What I would like to know is when working on a Windows machine; what would be the preferable method between the two case scenarios to build POSIX designed libraries to be able to link properly into MSVC Window's based applications? Another words, I would like to efficiently convert POSIXspecific libraries to be able to work on my current platform or machine. Notice that I did not say that I wanted to "rewrite" the libraries to make them portable to any arbitrary environment. In this specific case I only need them to run on my Windows environment. Or any other appropriate method. I will be using some C and some C++ libraries to be linked into my MSVC c++17 project(s). (I may also have some of the terminology wrong in some of my above statements or assumptions as I'm not familiar with Unix-POSIX environments).