[Bf-committers] MinGW support

Sergey Sharybin sergey.vfx at gmail.com
Sun Dec 27 11:41:13 CET 2015


40% seems quite suspecious to me. Is it a comparison against fficial builds
from blender.org sites? Does it include just a render time or also a
synchronization time? What are the absolute timing values?

Claim of rather dropping vc12 is kinda unlikely to happen. MinGW is proowen
to be rather buggy and tricky to use, failing to compile required libraries
for Blender (anyone succeeded to build OpenSubdiv, OpenShadingLanguage?).
Personally to me Clang is much more likely alternative to MSVC, it it at
least being used by quite huge projects now and some serious companies are
making sure it's running good.

In any case, please go back from speculation back to reality. Facts are:

- In the past 2 years there was no maintenance invested into MinGW
- Current libs are rather really old and do not meet our platform
requirements
- Svn folder is quite messy now, even failing to cleanly run `svn up`
- MinGW builds are not feature-complete at all

Now, here are possible ways of how things could go:

- There's someone from the community who jumps into and solves the issues,
making MinGW builds competitive with MSVC builds (featureset wise, ease of
setup, etc). Then we'll just have some awesome-ish builds and everyone is
happy.
- There's no one who wants to deal with those issues, then we'll stop
worrying about this compiler and stop advertising it as officially
supported at all. The issues will just keep accumulating and at some point
we'll just disable building with MinGW because it'll be just plain PITA.

To be clear: MinGW is too much flakey and it's really unlikely anyone from
the core team will have time or wish to deal with it. We simply do have
much more important things to do. So if someone believes in MinGW and it's
benefits lease jump in!

P.S. Clang support we can start in the separate thread, this is something
interesting to compare with (Clang vs. MinGW) but that requires some work
to be done first.


On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 3:14 PM, <blender at dingto.org> wrote:

> Can you back that value up?
>
> When we were still using MSVC 2008, the difference to gcc/clang was
> indeed quite large.
> But since we switched to MSVC 2013, I highly doubt it's more than 5-10%.
>
>
> Zitat von Yousef Harfoush <bat3a at msn.com>:
>
> > but is it not worth 40% render time reduction to support mingw, i
> > mean that's is like 2 years of optimizing cycles, isn't it, i think
> > it's better to drop vc12 in favor of mingw.
> >
>
>
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>



-- 
With best regards, Sergey Sharybin


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