A more compact alternative to Cygwin: MSYS

by Manu (modified: 2007 Jul 19)

During the work to support MinGW as a backend C compiler for EiffelStudio on Windows, we found MSYS which is a subset of what is needed to run a configure script on Windows. The side effect of this subset is that it contains most of the UNIX commands we have all been used to (ls, rm, touch, tail, tar, ....). MSYS is also very compact with less than 6MB uncompressed.

We are now using a subset of MSYS to compile the Eiffel runtime on Windows (before we required bash from cygwin but not all version of bash worked out of the box). Thus simplifying the steps for compiling the runtime on Windows to:

  1. Choose your C compiler and possibly configure it (not needed with MinGW or Borland since we use the one that will be in the EiffelStudio delivery).
  2. Compile the runtime using the Configure.bat script.

For more details see wiki:Compiling EiffelStudio