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Also, have you ever tried to do any serious in C++ development work under Windows? Downloading 10 gigabytes of SDK just to run the compiler is not fun. Also, m

Also, have you ever tried to do any serious in C++ development work under Windows? Downloading 10 gigabytes of SDK just to run the compiler is not fun. Also, most if not all compilers (GCC is a number 1 offender here) are much slower than Linux or macOS under Windows. It all depends on what you do, what kind of user you are and what kind of job you are trying to do. No one uses something worse on purpose, so there sure must be reasons why people still say installing Linux is worth it. WSL is good for those who would have run Linux in a VM anyway, but if you need Linux or if you're just used to it, it's still not enough.

mehrdadn 6y ago
I haven't noticed GCC being slower, though I admittedly haven't measured. Which build of GCC do you use? MinGW64? or MSYS or something else? If you use the versions that are Cygwin derivatives, they will probably be slower, but that's not really due to GCC.
- qalmakka 6y ago
  No, it's a native mingw-based GCC toolchain(cross compiler for an embedded platform), and everything is noticeably slower than on Linux or even macOS. I think it's because GCC is designed as relying on a multitude of separate binaries instead of being a single process. For each file it compiles it spawns a truckload of separate processes (collect2, cc1plus, as, ld...) and if there's something that's slow as heck on Windows, is spawning processes.
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    You're right about the slowness! I just noticed it now. I'm confused why though -- I don't actually see it spawning a lot of processes, and the slowness is far beyond what could be explained by that. Even a single process call appears to run much more slowly. I haven't dug into it but maybe the I/O pattern is funny?
stinos 6y ago
Downloading 10 gigabytes of SDK just to run the compiler is not fun. This is not very accurate. Just the compiler/linker (which doesn't need the SDK to build and run programs, i.e. equivalent of getting just gcc) is about 300mb to download. Then, assuming you're talking about the Windows SDK, which as far as I'm aware you only need when targetting OS-specifics is abut 700mb.

mehrdadn 6y ago

I haven't noticed GCC being slower, though I admittedly haven't measured. Which build of GCC do you use? MinGW64? or MSYS or something else? If you use the versions that are Cygwin derivatives, they will probably be slower, but that's not really due to GCC.

qalmakka 6y ago
No, it's a native mingw-based GCC toolchain(cross compiler for an embedded platform), and everything is noticeably slower than on Linux or even macOS. I think it's because GCC is designed as relying on a multitude of separate binaries instead of being a single process. For each file it compiles it spawns a truckload of separate processes (collect2, cc1plus, as, ld...) and if there's something that's slow as heck on Windows, is spawning processes.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  You're right about the slowness! I just noticed it now. I'm confused why though -- I don't actually see it spawning a lot of processes, and the slowness is far beyond what could be explained by that. Even a single process call appears to run much more slowly. I haven't dug into it but maybe the I/O pattern is funny?

stinos 6y ago

Downloading 10 gigabytes of SDK just to run the compiler is not fun. This is not very accurate. Just the compiler/linker (which doesn't need the SDK to build and run programs, i.e. equivalent of getting just gcc) is about 300mb to download. Then, assuming you're talking about the Windows SDK, which as far as I'm aware you only need when targetting OS-specifics is abut 700mb.