Re: Octave & Fortran continued

[Benjamin Lindner]

Michael Goffioul wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 7:36 PM, Benjamin Lindner <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Michael Goffioul wrote:
> > > Just for the record, mixing code gfortran and MSVC is a tough beast
> > > and up to now I didn't succeed. Doing the same with g77 was easier
> > > as MSVC could link in g77-compiled objects by also linking to libf2c
> > > (compiled with MSVC). This provided the needed runtime functions
> > > required by g77-compiled code.
> > >
> > > Given all these problems, I decided to give MinGW a try, using the
> > > latest version based on gcc-4.3.0. But recompiling all deps takes
> > > time, given the only 30min of free time I have in the evening...
> > I found that the 'official' mingw gcc-4.3.0 package is quite buggy in the
> > sense of packaging.
> > I switched to TDM's ports of mingw32/gcc and they work like a charm in my
> > case.
> > I currently use gcc-tdm-4.3.0-2, which also contains gfortran.
> > However I have no experience in the combination mingw/msvc...
>
> Official MinGW gcc is not buggy per-se, but I found 2 problems that are
> easy to fix:
> 1) some headers are missing in the g++ archive, but they are contained
> in the full .7z archive

Yes, this was the bugginess I referred to.

> 2) libstdc++ is compiled with concept-checks enabled, but some packages
> are not concept-checks compliant (like GiNaC); this can be easily worked
> around by disabling concept-checks in c++config.h

Interesting. I did not know this. How does the non-compliance manifest?

> [Note: I also got some problems in making old libtool work with that
> version of gcc, such that I had to re-libtoolize a few packages; maybe
> tdm-gcc works better in that area...]

Hmm, which problems were these? I only encountered one with newer 
libtool as used in fftw3 versino 3.2 where linker-options are not 
correctly recognized.

> Combining MSVC and gfortran is not really feasible, so I gave up that
> path. Instead, I spent some time recently to recompile everything with
> MinGW in the same way as I do for MSVC. I recently got a 3.0.3 version
> that passes all tests.
>
> While doing that, I started to think we (Benjamin and I) should merge
> our efforts, as most of the bits are similar. We should have a single
> build framework that is able to generate binaries for MSVC or MinGW.
> So, I started to rework my build scripts to use a modular approach
> like Benjamin's one, with additional support for automatic package
> detection and dependency building. However, it's still embryonic at
> this stage, but it'll re-use large parts of Benjamin's script and mines.
>
> Benjamin, are you OK to merge our work? If yes, are you OK that I
> make an initial proposal for build scripts and we start from there?

Yes and Yes. Go ahead and I'll put my 2 cents in when appropriate :)


benjamin