I’ve been evaluating some new libraries lately and as usual, I decided to take some notes.

POCO

POCO seems to be a nice complete C++ library filled with things that other languages like Python and Java have. It’s very feature filled, but it’s unfortunately obvious that the development team doesn’t spend much time working or testing on Windows (and when they do, it’s with MSVC). There is a MinGW build, but as of POCO 1.4.5 it’s designed for Cygwin MinGW, which is a variation of MinGW that you invoke with “-mno-cygwin” to remove dependence on the Cygwin libraries. No good for a pure MinGW+MSys user like myself.

So, I had to make the following changes to build/config/MinGW:

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DrMinGW is a fancy crash detection program for MinGW programs. Details can be found here:

http://code.google.com/p/jrfonseca/wiki/DrMingw

One of the really cool features of DrMinGW is you can alternatively invoke a DLL from your program to catch your crashes, instead of requiring you or your testers to install DrMinGW.

The problem is the library and DLL aren’t available for download, and building it from sources requires SCONS, which I can’t seem to get to work with it. So, my solution is to build it manually. Unfortunately, building it requires knowledge of some of the secret defines set by SCONS.

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