Very interesting discussion--I'm glad to see stuff is still happening
on this front, and great to hear from you again Blair.
On Jan 5, 2010, at 6:49 PM, David Kirkby wrote:
On Jan 3, 6:13 pm, Dima Pasechnik <dimp...@gmail.com> wrote:
Also, note that many parts of Sage are not developed by Sage
developers, e.g. Maxima, GAP. There is little chance that these parts
would be ported to Windows natively (on the other hand, e.g., GAP has
a Cygwin port, that is well-supported etc). I toyed with making a
native port of GAP to Windows some ten years ago. It was a highly
non-trivial task that would have taken me months back then (and
then I
was relatively well-versed in Windows programming).
So a "native" port of Sage would still settle for Cygwin ports of
some of its
modules.
That was why thought such a port would take 10-30 man years. William
and I disagree over what is a 'native' application, but as he said,
the lawyers can argue that one out.
It helps that Sage's primary front end is a web interface, in a
"native Windows" browser--as long as the back end runs smoothly and
out of sight the user won't notice how it works. As for those that
preferrer the command line, they'd probably be just as happy in a
Cygwin shell or VM (if they choose Windows at all).
I'm more hopeful about the Sage Python classes--Python and Cython are
both supported on Windows, and distutils is supposed to handle all the
linking stuff. I'm not saying there won't be issues though--from what
I've seen of it the path to a Windows port is littered with so many
tools and solutions that, in theory, should Just Work (cygwin,
colinux, virtualization, ...) but in practice just don't.
- Robert
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