Re: Performance issues on Windows, suggests a MSVC build

[John W. Eaton]

On 22-Jun-2011, Ben Abbott wrote:

| I expect that Octave has more to gain from Windows and MacOS users
| than there are liabilities,

Can you explain a bit more what you mean?  How do you see more users
being helpful?  I'd say it depends on the users we attract.  Are they
supporting us with funds or code or something, or do they just want
support for free?  If the former, then I say great, but if the latter,
then I don't see how we gain much.

| and am troubled by the decreased support for Windows

We have many Windows users, but not much in the way of Windows
developers.  How can we change this?  If the Windows users want
something to improve, then they need to provide some resources for
that, either by volunteering to do the work, or paying someone to do
the work.  Working on Windows systems makes me want to gag, but I'd be
willing to do it in exchange for $$.

| and rumored changes to development on MacOS (clang and
| such) which may make using gcc monre difficult.

I'm not sure I understand the issues, but Octave is not tied to a
particular compiler.  What prevents either using GCC when it is not
the system compiler (I've done that many times on many different types
of systems in the past) or building Octave with clang?

jwe