Re: Octave-3.6.1 for Windows (VS2008/VS2010) available

[Michael Goffioul]

On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 12:22 AM, Philip Nienhuis <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>> Maybe. It depends the additional size to the installer. If it adds
>>>> megs to the installer, I think I'll prefer to keep it separate,
>>>> especially if it's not mandatory for the io package normal usage.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Around 18 MB.
>>
>>
>> That's quite large indeed.
>
>
> Sure.
>
> Nitzan's MinGW binaries together constitute an almost 210 MB download; but
> as MinGW is free, a complete MinGW environment incl. compilers & rt libs
> could be included. 18 MB of jars don't matter much then.
>
> OTOH your MSVC binary is beautifully small, but I suppose that is mainly
> because it doesn't need much OS emulators and obviously you can't supply a
> proprietary compiler with it. So users of your binary would have to do more
> work anyway to get a complete Octave "environment".

There is an embedded MSYS environment in the installer, just enough to
run a shell and a few utilities. But indeed, the fact that there's no
compilation environment in the installer is the main difference with
MinGW. However, the compiler is ONLY needed if you plan to compile
something against octave, which is not the case for most users. For
users that do plan to compile something, they probably already have
the compiler installed.

Michael.