Re: gcc for building Perl on WinXP

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "kmx" <[email protected]>
To: "Chris Marshall" <[email protected]>
Cc: "Sisyphus" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2011 8:14 AM
Subject: Re: gcc for building Perl on WinXP


> Chris and/or Rob,
>
> could you please try the following:
>
> 1/ take 
> http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/p5.14.2.1-RC/strawberry-perl-5.14.2.1-portable-32bit-beta-1.zip
>
> 2/ take 
> http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/32_libs/5.14-extras/32bit_pthreads-2.9.0-bin_20111101.zip
> (unzip into the same dir as 1/)
>
> 3/ try to build PDL with pthreads support

Just getting to it now. (I know Chris has already established that the 
pthreads suport builds fine using his small patch to pthread.h. I'm building 
PDL-2.4.9_009, also with pthreads support  as provided by  2), above - and 
also with Chris's amendment to pthread.h.)

First thing I noticed with this Strawberry distro is that, as with most (all 
?) Strawberry distros, there's no gfortran compiler. This means that the 
Slatec and Minuit parts of PDL won't get built.
That's old news, and not all that critical - but I thought I should mention 
it anyway ;-)

Apart from that, all looks good

Unrelated to PDL, but the latest mpfr library (version 3.1.0) should build 
with TLS (Thread Local Storage) by default and straight out of the box. The 
version of the mpfr library that ships with Strawberry (version 3.0.1) was 
not built with TLS - which probably means that you didn't ask for it 
(--enable-TLS) when building the library.
Mind you, I haven't checked that --enable-TLS will work for mpfr-3.0.1 on 
Windows, but 3.1.0 certainly provided TLS for me ... and without my asking.)
No big deal - just thought I'd mention.
On threaded perls, that TLS capability can be handy for Math::MPFR.

I noticed, too, that the mpc library that ships with Strawberry hasn't been 
built to accommodate the complex.h types (double _Complex and long double 
_Complex). From a perl point of view, this hardly matters at all because 
there's no way to natively pass these types to  or from perl.
I did slap together a Math::Complex_C module that wraps the complex.h types 
and  functions, and thereby provides a gateway to passing these types to 
Math::MPC, but I doubt that anyone makes use of this capability anyway.
Besides, Math::Complex_C can sometimes fail a test or two, generally because 
of compiler bugs (mainly in the form of incorrectly implemented functions).

Cheers,
Rob