Compiling octave with MSVC

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Oct-2006, address@hidden wrote:

| For my personal usage, I ported octave to MSVC compiler (version 14,
| aka VS2005), which is freely available.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "free".  Although it may be
available free of charge, it is not exactly free (as in speech)
software.

In any case, can you say why you needed this, other than for the
challenge of doing it?

| Most of the work involved providing a build framework
| (Makefile's and config.h)

Since these files change often, I would really like to avoid having a
separate set of Makefiles for a single compiler that must be
maintained in parallel with the files generated from the .in files, so
we must find a way to generate the files automatically.  Isn't it
possible to run the MSVC compiler in a command-line mode that will
work with the configure script, possibly using the MSYS or Cygwin
shell?

| and exporting the required functions (+
| some small changes to cope with MSVC).  Is there any interest in
| such port? If yes, I could try to provide a decent patch (quite
| huge, due to the many required __declspec(dllexport) declarations),
| otherwise, I'll keep this locally.

Yes, I would be interested in seeing what is needed.

Would you be willing to first separate out the small changes to cope
with MSVC so we can evaluate those separately, then explain which
symbols need to be exported?

How did you mark the symbols for export?  I think I'd prefer to hide
the details in a macro.

Thanks,

jwe