USB programming environment

Discussion of chess software programming and technical issues.

Moderator: Ras

User avatar
Kempelen
Posts: 620
Joined: Fri Feb 08, 2008 10:44 am
Location: Madrid - Spain

USB programming environment

Post by Kempelen »

Does anybody here succesfully run a complete compiler environment from a USB Storage pendrive (windows)? What compiler and how?
regards,
FS
Fermin Serrano
Author of 'Rodin' engine
http://sites.google.com/site/clonfsp/
wgarvin
Posts: 838
Joined: Thu Jul 05, 2007 5:03 pm
Location: British Columbia, Canada

Re: USB programming environment

Post by wgarvin »

I haven't done it for a while, but I used to have a mingw version of GCC that I copied around from computer to computer. It can run off of a USB flash drive under Windows with no problems. I've hardly ever done that though because my machines all have local hard drives, so I just copy the folder onto the local hard drive and run it from there.

Even Microsoft's compiler should be fine running off a USB key (you might need to track down a few .DLLs or something and copy them in there with it).

The only thing I can think of to watch out for, is that you should try to avoid writing output or temporary files (.obj and such) onto the USB drive, because that will be slow. If you have large output files like .exe or .pdb, writing them to the USB drive over and over can also be annoying. If you keep your source tree on the USB drive, you should take steps in your makefile (or wherever) to put the .objs in a proper temp directory. Maybe you can use a directory on the local hard drive for output only ?
Tony

Re: USB programming environment

Post by Tony »

Kempelen wrote:Does anybody here succesfully run a complete compiler environment from a USB Storage pendrive (windows)? What compiler and how?
regards,
FS
Yes, for all my costumers, I have created a windows virtual machine, with a programming environment specific for each company ( vs 2003/2005, c#/VB, delphi 5-7-2005, sql server or oracle, winxp/vista).

I store these on an external usb harddisk, and just run them when I need to. ( ie I do not need to copy them to my harddisk)
(Also great for testing purposes, when I want to make sure I have a clean machine.)

The biggest one is 16Gb ( oracle server environment) but normally 5-8Gb so it should fit on a usb pen.

Tony