GNU Alternatives to CW/MSVC ??

[shahed100]

Is there any way to use Mingw or cygwin/gcc or any other opensource Windows C Compiler, to develop applications for the Emulator ?

I fail to understand why only MS or CW or Borland C++ Builder can be used.

If Microsoft libraries are needed, can they not be installed by simply downloading the Win32 SDK ??

I know that I am missing something fundamental here, so can someone please explain it to me, as the 2 books and various docs that I have read so far do not state WHY there cannot be an alternative.

Thanks

[paskhin]

I mean for that you must recompile all components (Emulator ...) with compiler GNU.
Also you must develop all Window API SDK with this compiler too and so on. In short words you must create new GNU-Windows.
The key answer on this question looks like the answer on question Windows or Lunix is the best.
Open Sources is non enterprise products. These products are only for educational purposes.
I prefer develop with powered IDE like MS .NET and don’t think about problems of unused other C++ compiler and don’t resolve the problems with .their using.
I mean their owner and fans must do it. I prefer to choose the best.

[peter.koellner]

Apart from the emulator, you could fetch the sources from symbian home and compile the toochain for cygwin.
Of course, you have to keep the SDK to provide the libraries. the perl tools might have to be reinstalled,
because there seem to be severe problems with PATH components containing whitespace like in "..\Common Files\..."
i think the other tools like petrans need a little work, but should be much easier than building everything on linux.
I don't quite understand what pashkin is trying to say about Open Sources not being enterprise products, since the Cygnus version of GNU arm-gcc definitely is Open Source. But I don't want to get into that discussion and wish him good luck with his "powered IDEs"...

[pjmlp]

Maybe a project for providing free C++ tools could be started by the community.

I fail to see why I am able to get free J2ME tools and not for C++.

I guess that many people would like to develop C++ application for Symbiam but just can't afford the price of one of the supported IDEs

--
Paulo

[peter.koellner]

you may download the sdk containing the cygnus arm-gcc compiler freely, and as long as you don't depend on having funny colored windows doing the work there is no real need to spend money on an IDE.
The SDK contains everything you need to build applications, and you can also start the emulator from the command line. so it is not *that* bad :-)