On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 02:38:06PM -0400, Robb, Sam wrote: >>OTOH, Corinna is hard at work adding low-level Nt* calls to cygwin so, >>if it wasn't for the requirement that everything has to work on Windows >>9x, the DLL would be smaller and faster. Instead, every system call >>currently needs to have a "do this if it's NT and that if it's 9x" test >>so "we" have been slow in moving to bypass the win32 api layer on >>Windows NT. >> >>OTOH, we will rebuild it. We do have the technology. > >Is there any reason why the cygwin DLL couldn't be built twice: once >for Win9x, and once for WinNT-based systems?
We've thought about doing that. This introduces its own support burden. Either you sprinkle the code with ifdefs or you introduce 9x and nt directories. It's still a possibility, though. One thing that I've been moving to is an improvement in cygwin's autoload functionality so that you could use something like "CreateFile" in the cygwin code but really use a wrapper for "NtCreateFile" if it was available. You could do things the other way around, so that NtCreateFile is used in the main code which invokes a NtCreateFile wrapper for 9x systems but I am leery of doing things this way since that means that the only people capable of writing code for cygwin are the people who understand Nt* calls. That is a subset of the already small number of people who understand the UNIX and Windows APIs well enough to work on Cygwin. cgf -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
