Re: [Maxima] Fw: [Gcl-devel] Re: gcl on ms windows

[Mike Thomas]

Hi all.

I'm pleased to announce that I now have a native Win32 (text mode only)
build of Maxima 5.9 as well as GCL 2.5, both based on the latest CVS
sources.  The build was hosted under Cygwin using the standalone Mingw32 1.1
gcc compiler.  I have done some simple polynomial factorisation, linear and
non-linear equation manipulation, linear algebra and integration to do a
first, successful, check of the viability of this setup.

Thanks to Camm (various bits of help), Rainer Keuchel (for the memory
checking code from his WinCE/32 port of GCL and inspiration) and Dan Stanger
(pointer about fasd format switch and other knowledge bootstrapping).

In compiling Maxima, I found that there is a bug in GCL's MAKE-PATHNAME
function which I have not had time to fix - it doesn't handle executable
names with .exe extensions properly.  I worked around this by using
STRING-RIGHT-TRIM on the result of SI::ARGV in "init_max1.lisp".

I will be unable to do anything further on this for a couple of days, but I
hope to check everything into CVS as soon as possible.

I guess after that the next steps will be:

  - making the help system work (more path trouble I think),
  - making binaries available for testing,
  - reviving XMaxima,
  - tuning the configuration process, and
  - using MSYS rather than Cygwin to host the build.

I make no promises on time frames for this list.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.