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.

Just taking a fresh example (install it last sunday): PSDK for AMD64
(platform SDK). This is the recommanded C compiler to compile OCaml for
Win64. It takes 935MB (ok this is not 1GB). It is just what is replacing
mingw !!!!

Other examples:
- games
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team, takes ~6GB (official number from
  microsoft website)

If hard disk space were a problem, nobody would install Microsoft
products...

Another information, I have various benchmark on cygwin. My conclusion
was not what i have expected. Most of the time cygwin runtime has a good
speed. This is not so slow in fact. I think most of the slowness you can
see is because you are working in a MSDOS/emulated X terminal which
seems slow (but is not, this is just a question of refresh rate).
Seriously, cygwin is not that bad. I would still not recommend using it
for various other reasons.

Regards
Sylvain Le Gall