Building ZAF Win32 using CygWin32

[Thomas Nichols <thomas dot nichols at mail dot com>]

Hello,
I'm a newbie here so please excuse this question if it's inappropriate and
too long.

I want to build the Zinc Application Framework using cygwin32. I've been
using it commercially for the last 5 years, it's ecellent, much cleaner
than MFC, and fully cross-platform to boot. The new version (ZAF5) is much
faster, and much improved from a total library overhaul.

Background: Zinc support GNU under many Motif platforms, but only the usual
Wintel compilers - MS, Borland, Watcom etc. I want to use GNU for the Win32
builds as well - www.gnu.org refers me to cygwin, which has installed fine
(2.7.2 b18). I can build a MessageBox("hello world") app on a Win95 box -
all runs fine.

Problem: when I try to build ZAF (remember, this source compiles fine under
many Windows compilers, and GNU C++ on Solaris, HP/UX, AIX etc. etc.) I get
compiler errors. Tokens such as "WNDCLASSA" and "WC_DIALOG" are not in the
cygwin headers. What can I do about this? Can I use the Microsoft header
files instead, and rebuild cygwin32 using these? (This I don't fancy at
all). Or is cygwin just a bit behind the other compilers? For example, it
has "WNDCLASS" defined, but not "WNDCLASSA". I've tried putting in my own
patches to support these extra tokens, but it's starting to look like a big
job.

Question: is Cygnus GNU / cygwin32 the right tool to use as a native
Windows compiler for Windows only code? Much as I like having bash et al,
I'm not trying to port Unix code to Windows, only find a port of the GNU
C++ compiler to Win32.

Is anyone else doing native Win32 development using cygwin32?

Are the cygwin32 "windows..... .h" headers being extended, or are they
likely to remain as they are for a while?

FYI: Zinc have just changed their licensing so one can build "Personal"
apps from their freeware distribution. This is a very powerful tool, if you
haven't seen it: well reviewed by Unix Review, PC Week etc. For these
reviews and the free source code visit
http://www.zinc.com

I hope someone can help with this lot,
Thanks
Regards
Tom.


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