I was planning to program in c using cygwin on windows. Does this have any performance drawbacks when compared to using gcc in ubuntu?
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1cygwin is huge and in my experience slow. If possible, its better to write your program under linux, and later get it building correctly under cygwin/minsys on windows.Merlyn Morgan-Graham– Merlyn Morgan-Graham2011-06-27 03:12:22 +00:00Commented Jun 27, 2011 at 3:12
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3 Answers
I've used Cygwin on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 for C development. The experience was painful: not only slow, but I never did manage to get my preferred editor (Emacs) working properly in Cygwin.
You could try a live distro of Linux that you could boot from a USB memory stick. That way you could program in C to your heart's content without having to install any software on your PC. I'd recommend Puppy Linux if you took that approach.
Alternatively, you could install a virtualisation product (like VirtualBox) and create a Linux VM. In that case, I'd suggest using Ubuntu.
My experience is that either the live distro or VM approach would be better than using Cygwin as a development environment.
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You won't get the exact same performance. But whether this is a drawback or not depends on what you are doing.
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Few more things to understand:
GCC-Cygwin:
Pros -
Compiling C code using gcc under cygwin would generate a windows executable, which uses the cygwin.dll(Posix emulation layer) linked dynamically into your app/code. So if you need to execute this app from some other path or other windows machine, that should have cygwin installed and in its path else you get error.
Cygwin provides a benefit in that, if you have a POSIX compliant code developed on Linux-gcc you can compile it with no changes at all(very little changes in some case) on windows. So it kind of provides Posix compatibility on windows.
Cons -
If you are going to run some which is going to consume heavy system resources(memory,CPU) then not sure how cygwin would scale up as compared to a native executable on Linux.
Sometimes, Debugging using ddd on cygwin, I have found some weird crashes/hang of the ddd.
GCC-Linux:
If your final app is going to be executing on Linux, it makes sense to compile, and debug it under the same environment. Linux-gcc.
For Debugging , linux would provide you lot of tools (gdb/ddd, valgrind), etc.
If you want to accelerate some critical protion of code, using inline assembly with gcc under linux is nicely defined and has no issues working.(Udner Cygwin, i have faced sometimes that getting a inline assembly compiled was a problem)
If you want to add multiple threads for execution on multiple processors/cores, then pthreads comes to your help(Not sure about the same udner cygwin)
