Python application launcher (for Python code)

[Deborah Swanson]

Grant Edwards wrote, on February 22, 2017 7:52 AM
> 
> On 2017-02-21, Chris Warrick <kwpolska at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Git Bash, or basically msys, is pretty reasonable. But if you are on

> > Windows 10, you might like the built-in Windows Subsystem for Linux 
> > (aka Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) more - it's real Linux that runs 
> > alongside Windows, but less crazy than Cygwin.
> 
> Cygwin is indeed crazy.
> 
> I've been in awe of it for 15 years.
> 
> Even  sshd works (if you're carefuly and a little lucky).
> 
> It's a medium-sized miracle that Cygwin works as well as it 
> does.  For a few years, I distributed and supported a custom 
> snapshot of base Cygwin plus a software development kit for a 
> specific hardware product.  It was not fun.  Cygwin is a bit 
> brittle and presents many mysterious failure modes. But, had 
> I not seen it myself, I never would have believed Cygwin 
> would work in a useful way.
> 
> In then end, we gave up on supporting Cygwin for our Windows 
> customers.  It's actually easier to install Ubuntu in a VM 
> and have them use that.  The last customer I had who was 
> trying to install Cyginw and use it for development spent 
> weeks and never got everything to work with Cygwin.  About 
> two hours after I finally convinced him to try Linux on a VM, 
> I got an e-mail saying his Linux VM as installed, the 
> devleopment tools were installed on that, and he was happily 
> building his applications.
> 
> -- 
> Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I 
> know how to do
>                                   at               SPECIAL EFFECTS!!
>                               gmail.com            

I tried Cygwin once. I had a fairly complex library of C functions I
wanted to rewrite portions of in Python, and I wanted to run the C code
first, and be able to use a running C version to check my Python version
against. I couldn't afford Visual Studio, especially since there was
only this one project to use it for, and Cygwin seemed like a reasonable
alternative. Cygwin has an avid fan club of followers for using Cygwin
to write and execute C code, and as an IDE, I think. But I couldn't get
it to run right, and I usually get along pretty well with software. Not
an experience I'm eager to repeat.

Deborah