Re: Compiling octave with MSVC

[Andy Adler]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 10-Oct-2006, address@hidden wrote:
>
> | For my personal usage, I ported octave to MSVC compiler (version 14,
> | aka VS2005), which is freely available.
>
> I suppose it depends on your definition of "free".  Although it may be
> available free of charge, it is not exactly free (as in speech)
> software.

Compiling free software with non-free compilers has always been OK, even
if is was not the ideal scenario. Many GPL software suites are compiled
with MSVC for the windows versions (for example, activestate's Perl,
Python and TCL)

I see many advantages to an MSVC compiled octave. It would be great
if MSVC compiled octave has improved performance. This would definitely
help octave's popularity.

Another applicaton: some of my research work has shown "hill-climbing"
techniques to reverse-engineer black box algorithms.  To do this, I
needed to link octave to the algorithm (which was non-free, but I
didn't distribute my changes).  Linking octave to windows DLL's is
currently a real pain. You need to go through an extra "translation"
*oct file just so the headers don't conflict.

So, while I understand that John may not see it worth his time to support
such an effort, I am personally a big fan of the ability to compile octave
with MSVC.

--
Andy Adler