MSYS2-packages VS zig

Google says (1, 2, 3) that this issue is caused by Avast/AVG antivirus moving some executable files (bash.exe in your case, seemingly) into its quarantine folder.

It's a known issue: https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/3150

Could you let me know of this is perhaps relevant to you? I will investigate sometime this week! Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

I am still on WSL1 due to the filesystem performance with WSL2. I recently tried to move more of my workflow towards MSYS2 but various things keep breaking for me without obvious reasons.

Latest issue I encountered was that GNU parallel simple does not work. [1]

[1]: https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/3289

I've already tested the rest of the tools needed for the build process (just Python 3.10 and PyInstaller) and they seem to work fine. My issue is that both MSYS2 and Cygwin do not work in WINE (this is pretty well documented: MSYS2, Cygwin), so I don't know of any other means of getting the Windows versions of GTK3 libraries in my WINE prefix so that PyInstaller can pack it all up for me.

It's old bug with gcc standard library implementation which has not been fixed, I guess most likely nobody made a bug report. I tested it myself and indeed it doesn't work properly and we are not alone: https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/1937.

My last experience with MinGW-w64 was when I was trying to compile my C++ simulation code in Windows and finding out that AVX instructions were not working because the compiler had misalignment-related bugs. (The issue is still open in https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/1209)

MinGW/MSYS certainly had appeal to former Linux devs who didn't want to touch the horrors of MSVC, but Zig (with its included Clang compiler/runtime) might end up being a better solution for people trying to compile C/C++ code on Windows in a stable manner.

There is an issue proposing this approach: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4284

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/224

e.g.:

> > When debugging/prototyping, it's useful to comment out a line without having to refactor, e.g.

When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).

NodeJS is by no means a slow runtime, it wouldn’t be so popular if it was. But compared to Bun, it’s slow. Bun was built from the ground up with speed in mind, using both JavascriptCore and Zig. The Bun team spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make Bun fast, including lots of profiling, benchmarking, and optimizations.

ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()

There are valid reasons to use APIs from NTDLL. Where I disagree with zig#1840 is the idea that it is always better to use NTDLL versions of API. Every other software ecosystem uses the standard Win32 APIs and diverging from that without a good reason seems like a good way to have unexpected behavior. One concrete example is most users and programmers expect Windows to redirect some file system paths when running on WOW64. But this is implemented in Kernel32, not ntdll.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/11894

Zig also has an IRC channel on libera (#zig) that is moderated by Andrew Kelley.[1]

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community