Overview of the status on Windows

This page presents an overview of the various Windows platforms and the status of the CBS for them.

The platforms are "canonical": we assume typical or often encountered installations. For "bare Windows" this means Windows XP, Microsoft Visual C/C++ (version 6.0, 2003 or 2005, but currently with an emphasis on version 6.0). For Cygwin and MinGW this is the suite of GCC compilers.

Status per 19 september 2006, Arjen Markus

  
----------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+               
Build aspects         |    Bare Windows    |        Cygwin      |        MinGW       |     Borland 5.5    |
----------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+
Static libraries      |        Yes         |         Yes        |         Yes        |         Yes        |
Shared libraries (DLL)|        Yes         |         Yes        |          .         |          .         |
C++                   |        Yes         |         Yes(1)     |          .         |          No        |
Fortran               |        No(2)       |         Yes(3)     |          .         |          .         |
Java                  |         .          |          .         |          .         |          .         |
Perl                  |         .          |          .         |          .         |          .         |
Python                |         .          |          .         |          .         |          .         |
Tcl                   |        Yes(4)      |          .         |          .         |          .         |
Tk                    |         .          |         (5)        |          .         |          .         |
----------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+

Notes:

• A dot (.) simply means this aspect has not yet been tested
• (1) GNU C++ caused a problem on one machine, but others were successful. Something wrong with the toolchain?
• (2) The compiler that was used, Compaq Visual Fortran, complains about the full name of the object files that CMake passes (these are in UNIX-style). This means that CMake currently does not support CVF.
• (3) The Fortran compiler used is gfortran
• (4) The build succeeds currently, but pltcl.exe, the shell that is built, stops immediately. Most likely a problem with the set-up (initialisation files like init.tcl are missing/not found?)
• (5) Reportedly, the Tk bindings use more of the X Window library than has been ported to the Cygwin/MinGW platform. There is also the issue of several UNIX specific Tcl routines that have no equivalent on Windows.