> Personally I anticipate very much a windows version of YADE, although > I myself currently have no time to do this. Since we should aware the > potential users of YADE, a large percent of the users would be from > Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering community. If we keep > compile YADE purely on Linux, I am afraid we might lose some potential > users: the learning curve for Linux and YADE is way much longer than > windows, although we can argue Linux is a good, free, open source > system, but I did see some people gave up and turned to sth like PFC, > typing command and debugging source codes is not a mandatory training > for most Civil Engineers. In a word, can we make things easier? :-) > I don't have any windows machine by hand where I could test things. But it there are people creating (and maintaining) the port, I don't see problem with that. Let me add, though, that I don't have time to actively support that at this moment, nor do I think it is that important for yade: it is not mature enough (e.g. compared to pfc) to be used by people who don't know how to type a command and debug source code.
There are a few problems that will be faced for sure when working on pure-windows port (no cygwin): 1. scons works under windows, but SConstruct file contains a few UNIX-isms, like / for path separator and default directories. 2. the plugin loader may have issues (not sure). 3. at a few places, POSIX (but not standard libc) functions are used. The qt gui has a few calls to xlib functions as well. 4. some gcc extensions are being used (like __attribute__), they will not work with other compilers. (5. If windows-specific things begin to complicate source code, the advantage of relatively homogeneous development platform will be lost and many devs will grumble about that (me inclusive).) Regards, Vaclav _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~yade-users Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~yade-users More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
