[Development] Choosing a new MinGW for Qt/Qt Creator/Qt SDK

[marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com]

If you click the link in Daniels initial email, and onto the windows host directory, you would see that the have both the 4.7.0 release and the 4.7.1 prerelease as binaries already.

--
Sent from my Nokia N9

On 4/19/12 16:14 ext Mark wrote:
2012/4/19 <daniel.molkentin at nokia.com>

Hi Everyone,
 
After several complains from the community that GCC 4.4 shipped with both Creator and the Qt SDK is fairly outdated (and not C++11 compliant), we are going to ship a mingw.org-based GCC 4.6.2 with the next Qt Creator release. Even though we verified that this works with the MinGW 4.4 compiled Qt releases from the Qt SDK, I think we should agree on a common version. Thus, I want to come to an agreement with all relevant stakeholders in the Qt  Project on which MinGW to ship.
 
From my POV, the following things are important when choosing a “proper” MinGW-based compiler:
 
-          Prefer existing MinGW distros* over compiling & maintaining MinGW ourselves (although others may disagree here)
-          Make sure they are minimal and centered around C/C++ development (i.e. no elaborate gjc cruft like we still have in our current MinGW 4.4 packages)
-          Make sure we pick a distro that provides regular updates and provides new GCC versions in a timely manner
-          Let’s ship both a 64 and a 32 bit version, and ideally ones that provide a cross-compiler respectively
-          Let’s make sure we start providing them at the same time, and we start building our products with them
 
Marius found http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds/files/, which seems to satisfy all of the above. Other suggestions/preferences are welcome.
 
If deemed necessary, we can also build our own MinGW distro via Qt Project’s public build infrastructure (http://builds.qt-project.org). We need good build recipes for that, though, and someone who is willing to maintain them.
 
Cheers,
  Daniel
 
*) by “Distro” I mean different entities compiling & providing MinGW releases such as MinGW.org, TDM, etc




Why not wait till there is a MingW with GCC 4.7.0 release? I'm asking that since GCC 4.7 adds support for AVX and AMD bulldozer (bdver1) specific compiler optimization which seem to be greatly beneficial for AMD cpu's. So it might be worth the consideration to postpone the next Qt Creator release till there is a MingW with GCC 4.7.0.


Just my opinion.


Cheers,
Mark