kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Craig Southeren <craigs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 22/09/2012 3:19 AM, jean-pierre charras wrote:

...deleted

> First, thanks for your involvement in Kicad.
>
> Yes, support for the Microsoft compiler suite is not a priority for 
> the KiCad maintainers.
> The reason is Kicad is not a tool like wxWidgets or qucs.
> Therefore, generally speaking, support for many compilers is not a 
> priority.
> Having said that, testing Kicad build with other compilers than GCC is 
> a good thing.
> It gives opportunity to find some issues or weak point that do not 
> appears with gcc.
> Developers are interested in patches to allow a clean compile under 
> Windows, Linux and MacOs.
> The main reason developers are not motivated by MSVC it MSVC is not 
> multi platform,
> and therefore has no interest for us (remember Kicad runs under 3 
> platforms).
> is short:
> Developers are *very* interested in patches to allow a clean compile 
> and fix weak points,
> but do not have a great interest to fix some obscure issue specific to 
> MSVC,
> and especially do not want a lot of #ifdef MSVC in Kicad source.

I'm a developer and co-founder of a C++ multi-platform toolkit 
(www.opalvoip.org) that runs on
Linux, Windows, MacOSX (and others). This project has been running in 
various forms since 1998
and is the VoIP library behind the Ekiga program as well as countless 
commercial programs

We have our code compiling natively on several different platforms. Gcc 
of course, and MSVC
(we dropped support for VS2005 recently and VS2008 is probably not far 
behind). Sun has
their own compiler and Apple are using LLVM which has it's own issues. 
We also support
various embedded environments at times - these come and and go :)

Supporting all of these allows us to leverage the best of all 
environments and different compilers
pick up different issues. gcc is good at forcing template foo to be 
correct, but MSVC picks up
lots of minor mistakes that gcc ignores.

All of this takes time, and I agree that it makes perfect sense for 
projects to focus their resources
on a specific environment that makes sense for them.

Craig

--

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 Craig Southeren          Post Increment – VoIP Consulting and Software
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