kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 12/03/18 17:36, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> No doubt I'm out of touch. :)  It's been at least 10 years since I used
> msvs.  It's great that they have decided to support open source
> development tools. 

Hi Wayne,

I hadn't used MSVC for a while until a few months ago where I had to
develop a small program for Windows. It was quite a positive change
since the previous time (also ~10 years ago). I appreciate the nice dark
coloured theme and greatly improved autocompletion/class browser.

Honestly, I don't care if MSVS supports Mingw or other non-MS toolchain
or debugger. What I care about is a compiler that doesn't take ages to
compile Kicad (for some reason MSYS's gcc is ~3 times slower than gcc
under Linux). Same applies to CMake and a debugger that works under Windows:
- In my case GDB and LLDB require some strange hacks (a separate
program) to send a ctrl-c to interrupt the application being debugged.
This hasn't been fixed since 2009 (see [1]) - so apparently nobody cares
to make GDB a working thing under Windows.
- Qt Creator crashes when I try to attach to running kicad process.
- Converting DWARF-2 symbols to MS PDB format (in order to use MSVS
debugger) using cv2pdb tool fails. Maybe due to debug symbols taking ~1
GB in _pcbnew.kiface alone. I also can't understand why the debug info
takes more than 100 times the size of the source code ;-).
- IDA Pro in free version doesn't support debugging...

Since we often do favors for our Linux users (e.g. by adding workarounds
for poor quality Linux graphics drivers), we should also be more
welcoming to the Windows users (and programmers) - it's only 70-80% of
our user base IIRC. Vast majority of Windows developers use MSVS. If we
want them onboard, we must support MSVS. I'm pretty sure there are
people willing to help with this on the mailing list.

Tom

[1]
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/711086/in-gdb-on-mingw-how-to-make-ctrl-c-stop-the-program