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That's an interesting name choice that might make it hard for me to remember in the future, do you happen to know why they chose it? In any case, I welcome a p

That's an interesting name choice that might make it hard for me to remember in the future, do you happen to know why they chose it? In any case, I welcome a posix interface for windows, it would be a cool tool to have, especially in the case of cross-platform utilities.

deleted 11y ago
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TickleSteve 11y ago
Any reason Cygwin isnt suitable? Thats the goto project for the type of stuff.
- glibgil 11y ago
  Cygwin doesn't have copy-on-write.
- dalias 11y ago
  The biggest problem with Cygwin is that programs linked with Cygwin inherit global state from from a Cygwin installation on the system they're running on. If you want to produce a Windows program that just runs on any system you install it on using Cygwin, it will work right for most users, but if a power user who has Cygwin installed and has their own custom mounts, options (like different binary/text mode settings), etc. tries to run your program, it might break spectacularly. This makes Cygwin a really poor choice for making binaries you want to distribute as standalone programs. Aside from that, Cygwin tries to hard to be a complete Unix environment on Windows, whereas midipix just gives you enough to use interfaces that were standardized in POSIX as a reasonable, uniform API for all operating systems to provide. Some functions go beyond that, but you don't have to use them. And even some things that are mandatory in POSIX are optional in midipix; as I understand it, you can choose at build time whether you want the overhead of being able to support tty devices (and the associated semantics like job control, signals from the controlling tty, etc.).
  - TickleSteve 11y ago
    It used to be like that... not anymore. Cygwin works fine with multiple installations these days [https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.multiple-copies https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.multiple-copies] The thing that wont work is if you try to mix and match a dll from one installation with binaries from another, but I think you can agree that that situation is fair. You just need your paths setup correctly.
userbinator 11y ago
I agree about the name - it sounds more suitable for MIDI visualisation software. Cygwin and MingW don't evoke any existing meaning, so I think they're somewhat more memorable.

deleted 11y ago

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TickleSteve 11y ago

Any reason Cygwin isnt suitable? Thats the goto project for the type of stuff.

glibgil 11y ago
Cygwin doesn't have copy-on-write.
dalias 11y ago
The biggest problem with Cygwin is that programs linked with Cygwin inherit global state from from a Cygwin installation on the system they're running on. If you want to produce a Windows program that just runs on any system you install it on using Cygwin, it will work right for most users, but if a power user who has Cygwin installed and has their own custom mounts, options (like different binary/text mode settings), etc. tries to run your program, it might break spectacularly. This makes Cygwin a really poor choice for making binaries you want to distribute as standalone programs. Aside from that, Cygwin tries to hard to be a complete Unix environment on Windows, whereas midipix just gives you enough to use interfaces that were standardized in POSIX as a reasonable, uniform API for all operating systems to provide. Some functions go beyond that, but you don't have to use them. And even some things that are mandatory in POSIX are optional in midipix; as I understand it, you can choose at build time whether you want the overhead of being able to support tty devices (and the associated semantics like job control, signals from the controlling tty, etc.).
- TickleSteve 11y ago
  It used to be like that... not anymore. Cygwin works fine with multiple installations these days [https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.multiple-copies https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.multiple-copies] The thing that wont work is if you try to mix and match a dll from one installation with binaries from another, but I think you can agree that that situation is fair. You just need your paths setup correctly.

userbinator 11y ago

I agree about the name - it sounds more suitable for MIDI visualisation software. Cygwin and MingW don't evoke any existing meaning, so I think they're somewhat more memorable.