Building with MinGW?

[Kelly O'Hair]

On Apr 21, 2010, at 5:58 AM, Raffaello Giulietti wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm wondering if anybody has already tried to build OpenJDK7 on  
> Windows
> using the MinGW suite.

If they have, I never heard from them.

>
> * Is there anything known to be a hard to circumvent show stopper?

To me the basic problem is that with "Windows" it is hard to separate  
the code
dependencies on the OS, some Windows SDK, something specific to Visual  
Studio,
etc. I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it is not a simple  
change and
parts of the jdk might be very difficult to disconnect from Visual  
Studio
dependencies. The code has assumed Visual Studio for a long long time.

If someone did it, and we were able to build either way, and the  
changes weren't
too outrageous, I'm sure we consider accepting that contribution.
But I just don't think it will be that simple.

> * Is it known why Visual C++ is still the reference build system on  
> Windows?

It was probably chosen as the defacto standard on Windows a long time  
ago and
there was never any value in changing that.
The performance was probably a key issue, and whether or not you could  
convert
to a different compiler set, before the official builds would ever  
change you
would need some very detailed performance measurements to verify no  
loss of
performance. That's not an easy job, or simple either.

---

Any change to the compilers used to create the binary JDKs we  
distribute is always
a change made very carefully. It might provide significant benefits,  
but the
hidden dangers are often difficult to find and diagnose.
I know this binary distribution model is of less interest to some who  
just want
to build the openjdk source for a particular platform, but it  
certainly is a
critical issue for us. Compiler changes are carefully tracked.

-kto

>
> Thanks
> Raffaello