Background: I'm working on porting a large project that was developed in C++ exclusively for unix systems, to be compatible with windows to make way for an eventual windows distribution. I don't have very much experience in Windows development, but I'd like to get whatever I can do, done right, before senior developers move in and take over.
Question: So for a while, I've been looking up Windows versions for all the unix/posix calls that are used in the software, most coming from dirent.h, unistd.h, and some ones under sys, like sys/stat.h or sys/types.h. And although it'll take a lot of work to modify the programs to adopt the new Win32 API calling conventions and return types (and sometimes all new functions), it'll probably work, eventually.
But I've been seeing this come up frequently, the fact that MinGW, I guess, includes many native unix calls and functionalities as part of the GCC environment, and can translate them into windows-compatible calls so you can compile on Windows, and use said compiled program on Windows easily. In fact, one of the similar questions I read in the sidebar talks about just that. What I don't understand, and seem to have trouble understanding, is exactly the extent of this built-in translation functionality, and where I can find a list of system stuff that'll work with this.
Sorry this post is a little unstructured and that I'm so green with this, but I only have 2 weeks to try to accomplish something with this before I get swapped with a senior developer.
No. MinGW does not attempt to implement UNIX functions on Windows. It cannot replicate most system calls with no effort.
However, Cygwin does do that.
Collected from the Internet
Please contact [email protected] to delete if infringement.
Comments