Hi,
I’ve been coding for a while with OpenGL under Linux, using the GCC compiler. Now, I want to change platform to Win32. Is there a open source compiler (non-commercial thus) that is suitable for use with OpenGL? I heard some things about MinGW and Cygwin. Are they capable of doing the things I want?
I’ve had some experience with DJGPP, works fine but is limited to DOS…
Do you mean by non-commercial, free? If so you can download free editions of Borland C++ Builder or Borland Delphi from Borland’s website www.borland.com. They are usually known as Foundation editions and I beleive they will work fine for OpenGL, even though I didn’t try them. However, I tried J Builder foundation and it has all the features I need. You can download them unless you want features related to database and enterprise applications.
I use Bloodshed Dev C++ and swear by it. http://www.bloodshed.net/ it’s easy to use and provides a sample app showing how to set up gl under win32. The editor has a few bugs but nothing that can’t be worked around.
I do not know about cygwin but you can use mingw or borland. Here is a
page with some information: http://sites.netscape.net/ptrpck/
Dev-c is just an editor that is distributed with mingw. You are probably
familiar with emacs and wim so dev would feel limited.
Cygwin might be pretty good if you’re used to programming in Linux. It’s a pretty nice tool and I’ve heard the latest version will even let you compile and run X, though I haven’t tried that yet.
M$ offers their 2003 visual c++ WITHOUT the IDE for free. You may even couple this command line compiler with Eclipse. But I haven’t gone this route yet (as I’m stuck withe the Eclipse + CDT + CygWin + OpenGL route).
link: http://csjava.occ.cccd.edu/~gilberts/vs03/
ALSO, their 2005 visual studio express versions are free for year. --ak