On Tuesday 14 October 2008, Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
> On 14-10-2008, Adrien <camaradetux@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2008/10/14, Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>:
> >> Le 14 oct. 08 à 09:59, David Allsopp a écrit :
> >>> Can I ask what the motivation is for this (out of interest, not
> >>> criticism)?
> >>
> >> Maybe because if you want to distribute executables using cygwin you
> >> have to release your code under a GPL compatible license [1].
> >>
> >> Daniel
> >>
> >> [1] http://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-3.10/notes/README.win32
> >
> > I would give another explanation : cygwin is big and slow.
> > A base cygwin install is at least 1GB (when fully configured, after
> > carefully reviewing *each* package), a regular one is 2GB. XP itself
> > is not that big, I've not seen many applications that big, only CAD
> > ones.
> > Cygwin is also slow, though it will probably not impact a student use
> > (networking is slower due to the translation, I have mldonkey in
> > mind). ./configure are also painfully slow, the need to run several
> > small commands where startup time is more important than runtime gives
> > cygwin no chance [1].
> >
> > On the other hand, mingw on its own is about 80MB. If you add a few
> > things, it will weight at most 200MB which is 10 times smaller than
> > the cygwin solution.
>
> Welcome in the windows world. For your information, there is a lot of
> thing in windows that is bigger than cygwin.

Sure, but people who will use OCaml professionally may well have some
of it installed and not Cygwin. I'd like a lot someone who has Visual
Studio installed to be able to build and tinker with OCaml.

Cheers, Kuba