[MATRIX-SIG] compiling NumPy for Windows

[David Ascher]

> I'd call that a serious problem for scientific applications, where
> distribution of source code is nothing unusual. Even if you adopt the
> Microsoft point of view that non-Windows systems don't matter, you
> still need executables for different chips (currently Intel and
> Alpha), and you can't expect every program author to have all systems
> available for producing binaries.

No, but I think you're being pessimistic.  There's really three platforms. 
Unix (source distribution works fine), Windows, Mac.  Even if we can't
come up with an automatic way of you (a non-Windows user) generating a
Windows makefile, I'm pretty sure I (or others) can take your Unix
makefile (provided it's not that complicated) and make a windows binary in
a day at most.  When there are so many extensions announced that we can't
keep up, we'll deal with that bridge.  I haven't coded on a mac in a while
(since the days of Think C =), so I don't know what the compilation
configuration issues are there.

Just last weekend I've SWIGged a couple of libraries, and I have been
thinking about the right way to package extension *source* distributions
so that they work well with both Unix and Windows.  Probably not too
surprisingly, it looks a fair bit like Tcl's distribution model.  

> You don't need the source tree for compiling extensions. If you can
> locate the libraries and header files, that's sufficient.

That's my point exactly.  All I meant was that we need to get them in
Guido's installer so that they are there.  And they need to be locatable
via the registry.

>> [we need COM and registry support]
> That doesn't sound like an unrealistic assumption.

Well, the logistics are somewhat tricky, since Mark is the author of
those, and Guido releases the base install.

> > I haven't heard anyone on this list mention anything but Microsoft's
> > compiler.
> 
> But there's a port of gcc plus some Unix tools to Windows, right?
> Would it make sense to recommend this to Windows users? It should
> make porting Unix stuff much easier.

There's a couple of ports, and they are all much much too incomplete or
expensive or hard to setup to recommend to the generic Windows user.  It
took me weeks to get my gnuwin32 setup "just right", and I have a fair bit
of experience with Unix.  Also, it's not at all trivial to get
interoperability between gnuwin/gcc-compiled DLLs and "straight" Windows
DLL's.  In other words I'd recommend heartily *against* setting up a unix
lookalike on Windows, except if, like me, you can't do without the shell,
grep, find, etc. 

opinionatedly yours,

--david


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