On 2013-03-01 14:48-0800 phil rosenberg wrote:
Hi Alan
Good to hear your interest. It's always useful to be able to pass
code around to get more than one person test it. As far as compilers go I use visual studio express. Windows has a number of faults when it comes to programming but the VS IDE and debugger really are fantastic and on its own VS is the reason why I use windows. Slightly off topic a friend emailed me this link http://xkcd.com/378/ which I think nicely sums up the case for a good IDE. Hi Phil: I just reviewed the download statistics for PLplot-5.9.9 at SourceForge over the last 12 months (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/plplot/files/plplot/5.9.9%20Source/plplot-5.9.9.tar.gz/stats/os?dates=2012-02-23%20to%202013-03-01). They have been averaging ~500 per month for many months which is quite credible this long after the release. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X respectively had 51 per cent, 23 per cent, and 11 per cent download share (with the rest of the downloaders having an unidentified OS). However, in contrast to the order of those download shares, I would say the current status is the PLplot experience is smoothest on Linux, and I therefore encourage all internal and external PLplot developers to help make the Windows experience just as smooth. For those (such as myself) only interested in using free (as in freedom) software, the Windows platform of choice is Wine. That platform is available both for Linux and Mac OS X, and on Linux I have had very good luck with the combination of CMake-2.8.10.2, MinGW-4.7.0, MSYS, and Wine-1.5.19. My efforts to make the PLplot experience on that platform as smooth as it is on Linux should also help PLplot users on the Microsoft Windows platform, and those working on smoothing the PLplot experience on Microsoft Windows also helps those on the Wine version of PLplot.
Anyway on a similar vein to your details on MinGW I've attached
instructions for setting up plplot using Visual Studio if you are
interested in giving it a go. It's intended to be a full walkthrough
so may be a bit on the basic side for you. They are also for VS 2008,
the latest version 2012 is a bit different and I have yet to try
building plplot or wxwidgets wth it. This will change very soon
however so I can access the C++11 threading functions we discussed
previously. My intention was to put this on the wiki, but I was
waiting for feedback on a patch I submitted to set up static linked
builds. I'll update the instructions for 2012 and put them on the wiki
when I get chance.
Although I have no interest in using the Microsoft compilers because
of their cost and also for the software freedom reasons mentioned
above, I did take a quick look at your notes, and I certainly hope you
make those notes available on our Wiki so that other Microsoft compiler users
can benefit from what you have discovered.
I have two further remarks about your notes.
(1) The original purpose of the CMake LIB_TAG variable was to indicate
(with a "d" suffix) whenever our library was compiled with a PLFLT
type of double rather than float. We currently do not use this suffix
on the csiro library names because that software does not use the
PLFLT type. My opinion is we should continue to set PLFLT to double
by default. However, we should add ${LIB_TAG} to the csiro library
names, and by default set LIB_TAG to the empty string. This would
then give users the freedom to set LIB_TAG to anything they like
(which you do now for all but the csiro libraries according to your
notes). But others here probably have different ideas because we have
used the "d" suffix for our PLFLT == double non-csiro library names
for literally decades.
(2) I don't recall your submitted patch for static linking builds, but
can't you arrange that simply by specifying
-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF for unpatched PLplot?
I will try to check the wingc driver this weekend to confirm your
findings. Thanks. As part of making the PLplot Windows experience smooth, I think it is important for the -np (no pause) option to work for this device. So any help you can give making that so (assuming it is not just a Wine issue) would be appreciated. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________
Building PLPLOT with Visual Studio.docx
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