How to make Octave build and run natively on Windows?

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Nov-2004, Ole Jacob Hagen <address@hidden> wrote:

| We have tested Octave on Windows within cygwin environment. And the 
| conclusion is not very good, since the performance is very poor, 
| compared to Octave on Linux.

What part of the performance is bad?  Do you have numbers?

| What is neccessary to build Octave with e.g MSVC, besides removing the 
| readline related files?
| What files is handling the readline stuff?

You don't have to remove any files to build without readline.  Try
running configure --help and you should find how to disable readline.

| If someone has started to build octave with MSVC, MingW and to run 
| Octave natively within Windows,

What does it mean to run "natively within Windows"?

Suppose that instead of having Cygwin as a separate library, we
included all the functionality we needed inside Octave itself.  Then
would you consider Octave to be running "natively within Windows" even
though the mechanisms it uses to communicate with the OS would be
exactly the same?  But why should we have to duplicate all that when
Cygwin exists precisely for this purpose?

Is it just that you object to having Cygwin?  Suppose you buy some
proprietary binary only software and install it on your Windows
system.  It could come with any number of crufty DLL files that do who
knows what behind the scenes, and you would never know or probably
care.  What makes Cygwin different?

The only significant issue that I see is that we have some filename
handling problems that make Octave on Windows systems work in ways
that surprise Windows users.  But I think that could be solved without
having to eliminte Cygwin entirely.

jwe