Overview of the status on Windows
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Revision as of 00:35, 21 September 2006 by Arjenmarkus (Talk | contribs)
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 21 september 2006, Arjen Markus
----------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+
Build aspects | Bare Windows | Cygwin | MinGW | Borland 5.5 |
----------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+
Library options: | | | | |
Static libraries | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Shared libraries (DLL)| Yes | Yes | . | . |
Dynamic drivers (6) | . | . | . | . |
| | | | |
Languages: | | | | |
C++ | Yes | Yes(1) | . | No |
Fortran | No(2) | Yes(3) | . | . |
Java | . | . | . | . |
Perl | . | . | . | . |
Python | . | . | . | . |
Tcl | Yes(4) | . | . | . |
Tk | . | (5) | . | . |
| | | | |
Drivers: | | | | |
PostScript | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Wingcc (7) | Yes | Yes | Yes | . |
----------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+
Notes:
- A dot (.) simply means this aspect has not yet been tested
- (1) GNU C++ caused a problem on one machine, but others were successful. Something wrong with the toolchain?
- (2) The compiler that was used, Compaq Visual Fortran, complains about the full name of the object files that CMake passes (these are in UNIX-style). This means that CMake currently does not support CVF.
- (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.
- (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.
