Difference between revisions of "Overview of the status on Windows"

Revision as of 09:46, 17 August 2007

This page presents an overview of the various Windows platforms and the status of the CBS for them.

The platforms are "canonical": we assume typical or often encountered installations. For "bare Windows" this means Windows XP, Microsoft Visual C/C++ (version 6.0, 2003 or 2005, but currently with an emphasis on version 6.0). For Cygwin and MinGW this is the suite of GCC compilers.

Status per 3rd November 2006, Arjen Markus and Werner Smekal

----------------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
Build aspects         |  Bare Windows  |      Cygwin    |      MinGW     |   Borland 5.5  |Open Watcom 1.5 +
----------------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
Library options:      |                |                |                |                |                |
Static libraries      |      Yes       |       Yes      |       Yes      |       Yes      |      Yes       |
Shared libraries (DLL)|      Yes       |       Yes      |       Yes      |       Yes      |      Yes       |
Dynamic drivers (6)   |       .        |        .       |        .       |        .       |       .        |
Freetype support      |      Yes       |       Yes      |       Yes      |        .       |       .        |
QHull support         |      Yes       |        .       |       Yes      |        .       |       .        |
AGG support           |      Yes       |        .       |       Yes      |        .       |       .        |
                      |                |                |                |                |                |
Languages:            |                |                |                |                |                |
C++                   |      Yes       |       Yes(1)   |       Yes      |        No      |       No(9)    |
Fortran77             |      Yes(10)   |       Yes(3)   |       Yes      |        -       |                |
Fortran95             |       .        |        .       |        .       |        .       |       .        |
Java                  |      Yes       |        .       |        No      |        -       |       -        |
Perl                  |       .        |        .       |        .       |        -       |       -        |
Python                |      Yes       |        .       |       Yes      |        -       |       -        |
Ada                   |       -        |        .       |       Yes      |        -       |       -        |
Tcl                   |      Yes(4)    |        .       |        .       |        -       |       -        |
Tk                    |       .        |       (5)      |        .       |        -       |       -        |
                      |                |                |                |                |                |
Drivers:              |                |                |                |                |                |
PostScript (psc)      |      Yes       |       Yes      |       Yes      |       Yes      |      Yes       |
PostScript (psttf)    |       .        |        .       |       Yes      |        .       |       .        |
Wingcc (7)            |      Yes       |       Yes      |       Yes      |        .       |      Yes       |
gd (png, jpeg, gif)   |      Yes       |       Yes      |       Yes      |       Yes      |      No        |
wxWidgets             |      Yes       |        .       |       Yes      |        .       |       .        |
cgm                   |      Yes       |       Yes      |       Yes      |       Yes      |      Yes       |
svg                   |       .        |        .       |       Yes      |        .       |       .        |
pdf                   |       .        |        .       |       Yes      |        .       |       .        |
----------------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+

Notes:

• A dot (.) simply means this aspect has not yet been tested.
• A dash (-) means that this option will not be supported for this compiler, as others covers this field.
• (1) GNU C++ caused a problem on one machine, but others were successful. Something wrong with the toolchain?
• (2) Obsolete
• (3) The Fortran compiler used is gfortran
• (4) The build succeeds currently, but pltcl.exe, the shell that is built, is missing DLLs. You need to copy these into the proper directory manually. (And you need to tell it where to find the Tcl initialisation files). Due to these issues, I (AM) have not actually tested this binding yet.
• (5) Reportedly, the Tk bindings use more of the X Window library than has been ported to the Cygwin/MinGW platform. There is also the issue of several UNIX specific Tcl routines that have no equivalent on Windows.
• (6) Dynamically loadable drivers will probably be too much to ask for using bare Windows - it requires a different implementation than the libtool approach used for all other platforms. Update:
  • It appears that libtool does support the Windows platform
  • We will investigate the possibilities for dynamic drivers in the near future
• (7) The fact that the wingcc driver works under bare Windows, means that the win3 driver is redundant. We could phase it out in due time.
• (8) With an additional module for CMake I (AM) got it to work. Some caveats at this moment (4 october 2006):
  • I turned off shared libraries - the Fortran bindings require compiler-directives to export the various routines
  • I needed to add the option /force to prevent the different default libraries (notably msvcrtd.dll and libc.lib) from causing errors about multiply defined symbols. This is a common enough problem under Windows.

See note 10.

• (9) C++ Bindings are in the moment not available, because of invalid characters in the foldername.
• (10) CVF works now with the extra CMake module, when using shared libraries (DLL). Main issue: the location of all DLLs that are used.