From maintainers-request at octave dot org Fri Nov 19 12:42:41 2004
Subject: Re: How to make Octave build and run natively on Windows?
From: "Paul Thomas" <paulthomas2 at wanadoo dot fr>
To: "Ole Jacob Hagen" <waterthrill at yahoo dot no>
Cc: <maintainers at octave dot org>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:43:03 +0100

> What part of the performance is bad?  Do you have numbers?
>

I have dual boot system XP + RH9, which was originally intended to
circumvent the "bad performance" of Cygwin.  Barring the much reported
carry-on with certain versions of gcc, cpu intensive applications are
sometimes faster under Cygwin than under RH9; not by much but a whisker or
so.  I think, although I have never made a quantitative comparison, that I/O
operations are slower on Cygwin.  Scripting operations, such as make, are
famously so.  Next time I build octave, I will time both builds.  I would
guess that there is a factor of two in it.

I now use Cygwin/XP nearly all the time and RH9 for checking software.

> system.  It could come with any number of crufty DLL files that do who
> knows what behind the scenes, and you would never know or probably
> care.  What makes Cygwin different?
>

Exactly!  Paul K's releases show just how little of Cygwin is needed for a
viable octave. ( Note to self - an API to mingw might be handy.......)

> The only significant issue that I see is that we have some filename
> handling problems that make Octave on Windows systems work in ways
> that surprise Windows users.  But I think that could be solved without
> having to eliminte Cygwin entirely.
>

One can easily learn to live with these "surprises".  Although, to begin
with, I was in Ole's camp, working continuously with Cygwin has proven to be
very easy.  Just tonight, I was doing benchmark comparisons of gfortran and
Digital f90, with an editor in Windows and Cygwin running the two
compilers - no sweat!

I agree with you John.

Paul T