Mingw

[Siddharth Rout]

What is MINGW? I read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinGW but honestly couldn't make much of it. If I have a MINGW app, then can it be easily converted to a VB.Net or C#?

Right now this is just in discussion phase and no code examples are required.. I have deliberately kept it in chit chat. If the discussion gets intense then I will move it to the most relevant forum.

[dilettante]

It depends.

Most often it is used to compile/build C or C++ programs though you can pile more on top of it to compile other languages that use C or C++ as an intermediate stage of compilation.

So can you "convert" programs written using it? Yes and no. Depending on the program this might be trivial or quite involved, but I doubt there are tools that even do the half-assed job a VS.Net VB6 to VFred conversion does. A program in C is so much "closer to the bare metal" than a .Net program it isn't funny. You might be able to make a C# program do the same thing as long as you're simply dealing with computation and string manipulation.


Its main advantage is probably the similarity in C syntax, fundamental libraries, and tools across multiple platforms. For example if you program with MinGW then moving to another GCC target such as ARM is an easy process. Think of it as providing a C compiler and tools at about the level of the command line compiler and tools in the older .Net SDKs. There isn't even an editor provided, let alone an IDE.

[Siddharth Rout]

Hmm, I see. One of my clients wanted to convert a Mingw code to C# code so I guess I will have to drop the idea... I can convert almost any vb6/vba/vb.net code to C# but this.... Seems like it is definitely not worth it...

[dilettante]

Again, if it consists mainly of computation and string fiddling it might not be too bad. It really all depends on what the bulk of the code does.