Parity is an open source project who's goal it is to ease porting applications from UNIX-like systems to Windows. It relies on the presence of a UNIX Layer for Windows such as Interix or Cygwin. Parity is most tested on Microsofts Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications, so it will work there best.
Parity uses Microsoft Tools - like link.exe, cl.exe, etc. - to mimic a GCC like interface, while really compiling natively for Windows. This results in pure and native Windows Libraries and Executables, which can be mixed freely with any existing Software pieces.
The most effort has been put into shared library handling, which now behaves nearly the same as on common UNIX-like systems. There also is a patch for libtool, which makes it know about parity (which passes all tests of the libtool test-suite). Advanced Features like a working -rpath option have been added to improve the handling of DLLs on Windows.
Parity ships with a little runtime enhancement library called parity.runtime. This library abstracts away the need to take care of what kind of paths are used. This means you can now give a UNIX-style path to an executable built with parity, and it will understand it. Previously this was not possible, and all Windows executables would need Windows-style paths to work.
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What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· fixed handling of frame pointer omission setting.
· fixed a problem in the loader when passing NULL to dlopen.
· added a little profiling information to the loader, telling the number of milliseconds it took to load all childs.
· parity.inspector has been improved, and now defaults to a more ldd like interface.
· parity.inspector now knows about native libraries, not linked with parity.
· parity.loader has a much improved loading failure output, which allows for much easier isolation of the real loading problem for shared libraries.
· parity.inspector verbose processing status output is now much more readable.
· parity.runtime doesn't allow for more than 3 nested exceptions before doing a hard exit. in previous versions exceptions kept flying until stack space was too low.
· parity.inspector has now a much improved memory utilization and overal performance.
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