Windows support in GDB

[Kris Warkentin]

Christopher Faylor wrote:

>I haven't asked what the problem is with just using cygwin with gdb.
>I suspect that the standard two problems are:
>
>1) cygwin is "slow" (which really only is an issue for configure/make)
>  
>

Actually, my preliminary compilation benchmarks show a 15-20% increase 
in compilation speed on MinGW versus Cygwin.

>and
>
>2) You can't trivially include your own version of cygwin1.dll with
>a distribution since it could conflict with a version already on
>the system.
>

3) Paths.  This is a HUGE problem because you can't assume that your 
Windows customers are interested in using a Unix style of work flow.  
MinGW supports regular Windows paths without the whole /cygdrive/ 
system.  If you have a pure Windows app interacting with Cygwin tools 
(take Eclipse for example) you wind up putting an awful lot of cruft in 
to deal with pathname conversion.  You can even get problems when your 
debug information in your binary has either Cygwin or Windows paths.

cheers,

Kris