On 20/04/2010 02:16, Moises Deangelo wrote: > Excuse my ignorance. > But what's the difference between gcc-3 and gcc-4?
Rather a lot! There have been lots of improvements added to gcc since the version 3 series, it has a whole new optimiser framework and tons of new features, also the new -4 versions support using DLLs for all the language support libraries rather than having to statically link them in to every application. For full details, take a browse through the gcc website: http://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html has a timeline of all the releases, with links to the pages telling you about the changes in each new release series: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.0/ http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.1/ http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/ http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/ http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/ ... as you'll see by browsing those pages, gcc-3.4.4 (the gcc-3 version in the cygwin distro) was released way back in May 2005, and all the major effort since then has gone into gcc-4 series. The most important points, from your angle, are probably these: 1. If you're using the -mno-cygwin flag to generate pure native windows executables that don't use the POSIX functionality of cygwin (so don't need the cygwin dll to run), keep using gcc-3; that feature isn't supported in the newer gcc. 2. Executables built with the newer gcc have more dependencies on shared libraries: apart from the cygwin dll itself, there is also a shared libgcc dll (cyggcc_s-1.dll) and the various languages also have support libraries (e.g. if you're using c++ your application will now need cygstdc++-6.dll to run). So apart from that: if you aren't depending on the -mno-cygwin flag, then use gcc-4, it's much better and has more new optimisations in it, but remember that anyone who wants to run your app will need to have the language library dlls installed - or use "-static" to make an app that depends only on the cygwin dll. If you really need to make totally stand-alone windows-only exes, stick with gcc-3, but otherwise try the newer one. cheers, DaveK -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
