gcl-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

RE: [Gcl-devel] RE: [Maxima] Re: Maxima cmucl patch


From: Mike Thomas
Subject: RE: [Gcl-devel] RE: [Maxima] Re: Maxima cmucl patch
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2004 10:53:31 +1000

Hi Camm.

| Greetings!  Mike, thank you as always for your lucid and very helpful
| exposition of this somewhat confusing situation.  I think you've made
| the case pretty convincingly that our MinGW32 port is somewhat more
| important than any other due to its ability to ship self-contained
| binaries and avoid slow emulation layers.  I.e. make the user
| experience as painless as possible.

Thanks.

|  (BTW, does your binary gcl
| package just contain mingw gcc and gcl?)

Yes, with the various libraries and headers for Windows development.

| As for developers, there are competing concerns -- designing a
| self-contained build process could attract people unused to the GNU
| toolchain, but having to reinvent all that functionality ourselves and
| for each project (i.e. gcl, maxima....), or to maintain a fork kept in
| sync with a traditional unix-like autoconf setup, would seem rather
| onerous given our current resources.

Agreed.

|  It would appear that you've
| found the right balance -- building on MSYS lets you use unix build
| tools without requiring a unix runtime for the user (if I understand
| correctly).

Exactly.

|  Is using/installing MSYS really difficult for a 'windows
| developer'?

Observing workplace developers with games and general Windows commercial
experience who have done nothing but Windows C and Pascal programming with
the traditional Windows tools - MSVC++ or Borland - leads me to answer
"Yes."  To change from a comfortable and very usable IDE to command line
tools and Emacs or vi definitely turns people off.  (Without wishing to
enter into the relative merits of those tools in this forum.)

On the other hand, I think that all of the language developers I know tend
to have Unix exposure so this may not be so relevant in our sphere, but my
personal experience as an occasional builder of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler
(a Windows rather than Cygwin application in it's distributed form) is that
Cygwin causes all sorts of problems when used in this mixed mode.  Likewise
my early experience with GCL.

MSYS was specifically designed to simplify those kinds of things.

| I know you indicated that you are happy with the status
| quo, but I'd like your opinion on whether our current windows build
| setup by itself is turning away interested windows contributors.

That's a good question to which I have no answer.

It's hard to guess the emotions of the people who have enquired about a
Cygwin build, but it appears that people have not been interested enough yet
to follow through and do the job.  In reality, it should require minimal
changes to the configury and care when dealing with the Cygwin C runtime
library not to make assumptions about what is present in the MinGW32 runtime
library (MSVCRT.DLL) and vice-versa.

I certainly want to avoid the overhead of keeping an additional kind Windows
build afloat with the time I have available.

| In like manner, I've never understood the efforts by some to reproduce
| the functionality of 'make' within lisp itself (i.e. defsystem??)

I think it has to do with the traditional notion of the Lisp development
environment in which you basically live and work while you program -
Smalltalkers have a similar approach.  Lisp machines and so on from the MIT
and Xerox traditions I suppose.

I was never there of course - I have just read about those systems.  Emacs
and *Lisp on the Connection Machine and the Squeak Smalltalk environment are
the closest I ever came to this way of doing things.  (Likewise, Borlands
Delphi and Microsoft's VBA systems in Excel and Access come to think of it.)
They are all part of that graphical approach which is actually a very nice
approach to development.

In fact, I thoroughly recommend you try Squeak - it is available on Linux
and is a real eye opener if you want to find out about alternatives to make
and friends.


|  In
| other words, once we have a working tool, why not just use it, even if
| 'not invented here', and go on to the business at hand?  Provided of
| course that said tool is not too difficult to obtain?
|
| Anyway, just $0.02.

Yes, sorry, I have spent several dollars now!!

Cheers

Mike Thomas.






reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]