Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] building gnuradio on windows with msvc

[Josh Blum]

On 01/02/2011 08:21 AM, Moeller wrote:
> Hi Josh, isn't it easier with the GNU-Toolchain like Mingw (Windows
> native) or Cygwin (POSIX/Windows API)? For Cygwin there are lots of
> prebuilt packages and others build easily with ./configure ; make.
> Some need to be patched. Once I managed to get gnuradio running in
> Cygwin (X-windows) with GRC and did some live operations (waterfall,
> spectrum) with the soundcard. Unfortunately the latest SVN versions 
> have some Boost and other errors and don't compile any more. The
> USRP2-drivers with raw socket interfaces didn't work, but with UHD
> and UDP-sockets this might be easier to realize. I don't have much
> experience with Mingw, but this gives you Windows native executables
> and is still very GNU-compatible. Usually I prefer Cygwin, but this
> gives you a lot of trouble when combining executables/DLLs from the
> Cygwin and native world (the exception handlers and runtime libs are
> not compatible).
> 

Well, lets assume you have to compile gnuradio stuff on windows. Its
going to be painful. The question is, were should it hurt?

If you put the burden on the code to be general enough to compile under
a non-gnu compiler (MSVC here), then the end-developer will have an
easier time, especially with the dependencies. Building the gnuradio
dependencies from source, many needing patches, when your are already
trying to build gnuradio... well its a world of pain to say the least.

So, the burden on the code, means a burden on some developers to port
components and periodically pull in the latest branch and test it,
backport fixes. Thats why I ask, is anyone interested? Is it valuable
lower the entry bar to gnuradio on windows? Because if not, the burden
then falls back to the end-developer to setup a mingw/cygwin and build
all the dependencies. I guess thats the way it is.

mingw: I don't have much experience with mingw. From the wiki, it looks
like you have to build all the deps from source. I tried once to get an
environment setup and gave up in failure. Maybe its much better now. Can
anyone with mingw experience weigh in?

Cygwin: I like thats its easy to install to get the useful command line
tools, but building gnuradio + dependencies on it is just crazy hard.
And its this pseudo-emulated environment. I don't know what that does
for performance, but the gui apps don't look pretty. I did get grc
working on it years back, then after some code overhaul, the python and
gtk related packages were out of date for years. Can't mix dlls, cant
use the pre-built gtk installer; no grc 4u :-)

-josh