[Help-gsl] about GSL and Windows

[Nicolas Limare]

Hi,

I am working on a research journal[1] with an editorial policy on
software[2], and we are considering the addition of GSL to the list of
libraries our authors can use[3].

With its focus on scientific computation and stable API, GSL is a very
good candidate. The only question for me is its portability, and I
would like to check with people on this list that my understanding of
the situation is correct.

GSL is written for POSIX+C89, so it must work on any environment with
these charateristics, which covers 2/3 of our use cases (Linux &
MacOSX). GSL should also be usable on Windows/Cygwin. But we need to
know more about the non-Cygwin Windows environment.

It seems that the compilation with MSVC is possible and non-officially
documented, but it requires some changes to the GSL headers, usually
managed by a script. Is that because Windows is not POSIX-compliant,
or because MSVC is not a standard ANSI C compiler (or is it..)? If the
matter comes from problems specific to MSVC, does GSL compile as-is
(without touching the source) on Windows with gcc (MinGW for example)?

And finally, we looked at GSL-vs-Windows a few months ago, before the
1.16 release. The incompatibilities I just mentioned may not be there
anymore.

Thanks for your help,

[1]http://www.ipol.im/
[2]https://tools.ipol.im/wiki/ref/software_guidelines/
[3]https://tools.ipol.im/wiki/ref/software_guidelines/#external-libraries

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE

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