Older versions MinGW to research

Older versions MinGW to research

[Wojciech Balawender]

 Hello,

I'm writing my master's thesis and I need older versions MinGW to my
research - as many binary versions as possible (since GCC 2.95) for
Microsoft Windows. I will test the impact of new language constructs on the
speed of compiling the source code and size of source code... and many,
many other things will be tested. Where can download all versions? ;-)

Thanks for the help
Regards,

Re: Older versions MinGW to research

[David Brown]

On 10/12/18 06:20, Wojciech Balawender wrote:
>  Hello,
> 
> I'm writing my master's thesis and I need older versions MinGW to my
> research - as many binary versions as possible (since GCC 2.95) for
> Microsoft Windows. I will test the impact of new language constructs on the
> speed of compiling the source code and size of source code... and many,
> many other things will be tested. Where can download all versions? ;-)
> 
> Thanks for the help
> Regards,
> 

I would say that if you want to test the different versions of the
compiler itself, you do /not/ want binaries.  A key point is that older
versions of gcc binaries will be compiled using older versions of gcc -
and this will cause artificial changes to the compile speed.  You would
be better getting the source code tarballs for different gcc releases,
and compile them all using the same version of gcc, with the same basic
optimisation settings.

And you should do yourself a favour and switch to Linux for this.  It
will be hugely easier to do, and eliminate many complications and
additional sources of variation such as the C library (which for MinGW
was MS's msvccrt DLL, but is different for modern MinGW-64).

If you follow these two steps, then the gcc source releases are all
conveniently available for download from the gcc website.

Re: Older versions MinGW to research

[Jonathan Wakely]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 at 12:46, David Brown wrote:
>
> On 10/12/18 06:20, Wojciech Balawender wrote:
> >  Hello,
> >
> > I'm writing my master's thesis and I need older versions MinGW to my
> > research - as many binary versions as possible (since GCC 2.95) for
> > Microsoft Windows. I will test the impact of new language constructs on the
> > speed of compiling the source code and size of source code... and many,
> > many other things will be tested. Where can download all versions? ;-)
> >
> > Thanks for the help
> > Regards,
> >
>
> I would say that if you want to test the different versions of the
> compiler itself, you do /not/ want binaries.  A key point is that older
> versions of gcc binaries will be compiled using older versions of gcc -
> and this will cause artificial changes to the compile speed.  You would
> be better getting the source code tarballs for different gcc releases,
> and compile them all using the same version of gcc, with the same basic
> optimisation settings.
>
> And you should do yourself a favour and switch to Linux for this.  It
> will be hugely easier to do, and eliminate many complications and
> additional sources of variation such as the C library (which for MinGW
> was MS's msvccrt DLL, but is different for modern MinGW-64).
>
> If you follow these two steps, then the gcc source releases are all
> conveniently available for download from the gcc website.

On the other hand, you won't find either mingw32 binaries or sources
on the GCC website, because it's a different project. You'd have to
ask mingw where to find their binaries, instead of asking GCC.