From kde-core-devel  Tue Apr 29 19:43:20 2003
From: "Ralf Habacker" <Ralf.Habacker () freenet ! de>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 19:43:20 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: RE: [QKW PATCH] dcopidl/win32
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=105164554600793

> Ummm thats the point ;)
>
> This is so we can use a native more stable Qt on win32.  This will aid the
> development of apps that can be more efficiently ported to KDE from win32.
> While cygwin is neat for playing around, it is by no means stable and fast
> enough for a company to ship an app on hence these changes are needed.
>
Yes, the kde-cygwin release is an intermediate step for a full win32 based kde,
which we like to see at some time in the future and a win32 based gpl'ed qt or
QKW is one major dependency for replacing xfree, which would be a major
(performance) step.
But there are other dependencies like the build system, the unix path layout and
some additional libraries. Currently mostly of them are available for cygwin and
runs well. Porting all this to visual c++ or borland bcc seems to me a harder
work as using cygwin today.

Avoiding cygwin means to rewrite many unix core functionalities used by kde like
forking, unix domain sockets, unix path schema, ipc and some more.
Yes, cygwin has some performance problems with some of this issues, but these
depends more on the underlaying os than by the cygwin layer.
For example win32 does not have a real fork, which has to be emulated.

Cheers
Ralf