Re: gcc for building Perl on WinXP

Hi Rob,

> 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 ;-)

I know about that :)

Apart from:
http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/p5.14.2.1-RC/strawberry-perl-5.14.2.1-portable-32bit-beta-1.zip 

http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/32_libs/5.14-extras/32bit_pthreads-2.9.0-bin_20111101.zip 


We have also prepared other PDL handy stuff - like:
http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/32_gcctoolchain/mingw64-w32-gfortran4.4.7-pre_20111101.zip 

http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/32_libs/5.14-extras/32bit_gsl-1.15-bin_20111104.zip 

http://strawberryperl.com/package/kmx/32_libs/5.14-extras/32bit_fftw-2.1.5-bin_20110506.zip 


It is only about decision how fat should strawberry perl be. Anyway you 
can unzip them into one directory and have a go.


> 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.

Thanks for this notice, I will try to use --enable-TLS by the next 
mpfr-3.1+ rebuild (according ./configure --help it seems not to be 
available in 3.0.1).


> 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).

To enable this should I pass some extra option to mpc configure/make?

-- 
kmx