On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 27 Aug 2014 02:13, "Bill Hart" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The biggest problem by far is the upstream projects who do not accept >> patches into their repositories to support Windows, and aren't willing to >> make the changes to their codebase to support Windows 64. Nor do they >> continue to maintain the ports once it is done. > > I can't say I have ever looked at it, but if true it is an odd attitude. I > found *generally* that upstream projects were happy to take Solaris patches. > A patch I made for GSL to run on AIX was accepted upstream.
I dug up a relevant thread. [1] Here's a real example thread involving a major patch to get pari to build on Windows. You can see the response by the core PARI developers, the issues with build support, etc. [1] http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/archives/pari-dev-0912/threads.html#00011 Near the end B. Allombert says: "Hello Vasili, I have applied a variant of you patch: On mingw you can now Configure PARI with ./Configure --datadir=@ and datadir will be set to win32_GPDATADIR() at run-time. This option is used when compiling the daily GP windows binaries starting at svn 12711." In short, it fully supports your argument that at least one upstream project (PARI) is willing to take upstream patches to support windows.... but you can also read in the thread about the difficulties. It starts with remarks about the pari devs not having windows access. > I an no fan of Windows, but with so many programs only working on Windows, > or tested more on Windows, I see it as a necessary evil. > >> This attitude in the Open Source community to Windows 64 really bugs me. >> It's a decade old technology, and not going anywhere. > > Lots of open source programs run on Windows, and with Windows being more and > more 64 bit, they will either have to adapt or > >> A port of Sage to Windows 64 is probably not a viable project. It would >> take years of effort by numerous individuals to accomplish. And it would >> bitrot before it was even completed. But the fact that it isn't viable right >> now doesn't mean that upstream projects shouldn't support Windows 64 so that >> if Sage ever wants to do such a port, it would be possible. >> >> Five projects Sage doesn't have to worry about are: >> >> * flint >> * gmp/mpir >> * mpfr >> * gmp-ecm >> * GNU Scientific library > > Maxima has a native Windows application, so that would work too. Maxims > uses ECL which is very portable. > > Unfortunately, I don't think Maxima has a library interface, do once that is > added, any attempt to make a more consistent user interface would be > hampered. We Sage developers (mainly Nils Bruin) wrote a C-library level interface to Maxima, for use by Sage. I don't know if it would be difficult to port that to Windows. It uses ECL = embedded common lisp (where the whole point of *embedded* is that it is easy to embed in other C programs). > >> I understand that Sage uses things like Lisp, Java, Python, Cython, etc. >> So the above doesn't help much with Sage overall. But perhaps it will help >> raise awareness for projects that are using C and assembly only. >> >> Bill. > > Call it "Mini Sage", foobar or something else, it appears to me a > significant subset of Sage could be built into a native application. > All of Sage could be built... with *sufficient* work. Everything could be ported and maintained... with sufficient work. But sufficient is really dauntingly huge. Bill only scratched the surface by listing technical problems at the C/C++ level - there's also tons of build system issues as well, longterm maintenance, etc. It's all totally do-able, but very expensive. > Anyway, it was just an idea I had. It's a good idea. I had the same one years ago... and that's when Sage started. A problem is that it's too hard today to do something really useful without significant funding (since it's all ugly dirty work, and definitely not research math). > > Dave. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-devel" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
