Re: [Chicken-users] Hypergiant egg install fails, and some other eggs

[Jeremy Steward]

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On 04/10/15 11:09 AM, Peter Bex wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 04, 2015 at 10:50:24AM -0600, Jeremy Steward wrote:
>> I suppose as one of the few people who has used / uses CHICKEN
>> on Windows I should chime in :)
> 
> Thanks for this!
> 
>> On 02/10/15 12:57 PM, Peter Bex wrote:
>>> The reason behind this seems to be that Blas itself is a bit of
>>> an old-fashioned library[...]
>> 
>> BLAS is problematic not because it is old, but because it is
>> made available through multiple implementations. For example,
>> BLAS can be made available through Intel's MKL, ATLAS, OpenBLAS,
>> and of course the original netlib.org reference implementation.
>> Keep in mind BLAS is often implemented in Fortran and then
>> exported to C, so depending on your implementation you might also
>> need to expose `-lgfortran` to csc as well.
> 
> Thanks for explaining this.  It's good to know about that.  Do
> none of the BLAS implementation offer pkg-config support, though?
> Even if you only support one BLAS library, it can still be
> installed in several different locations, depending on the platform
> and packaging system used.

As far as I can tell, none of the ones I mentioned above do. The
OpenBLAS guys would do it, but their issue tracker on Github suggested
they don't know how to write pkg-config files [1]. As for Intel's MKL,
it's proprietary. This means 1) I haven't utilized it much, and 2) I
have never seen it play nice with FOSS tooling. It could very well
export pkg-config bindings, but I doubt it.

As for ATLAS and netlib BLAS, they both suffer from being maintained
by a single developer who hasn't updated the software much (beyond
architecture compatibility) in years. That isn't to say that ATLAS is
out of date or bitrotted (it is in fact quite optimized and useful),
but the code itself is robust and well-tested, and prioritizes
platform compatibility over new features (IMO, I don't know or talk
with the developer, but this is the impression I get).

>> Agreed, please do not give up. Currently the way I use CHICKEN
>> on Windows is through Cygwin, because it is currently the easiest
>> way to install and link things (using plain MinGW64 is an
>> exercise in patience, IMO). Hopefully the midipix project
>> (http://midipix.org/) picks up, which will provide a much better
>> way to use CHICKEN (and other C libraries / programs) on
>> Windows.
> 
> Wow, this Midipix project sounds very promising!  Definitely
> something to keep an eye on, so we can (eventually?) get rid of the
> mess that is cygwin & mingw.
> 
> Cheers, Peter
> 

Indeed, it would be a great day when Windows is as easy to support as
Linux or BSD!

[1] https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/issues/598

- -- 
Jeremy Steward

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