yade-users team mailing list archive

[Václav S(milauer <eudoxos@xxxxxxxx>]

> Personally I anticipate very much a windows version of YADE, although
> I myself currently have no time to do this. Since we should aware the
> potential users of YADE, a large percent of the users would be from
> Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering community. If we keep
> compile YADE purely on Linux, I am afraid we might lose some potential
> users: the learning curve for Linux and YADE is way much longer than
> windows, although we can argue Linux is a good, free, open source
> system, but I did see some people gave up and turned to sth like PFC,
> typing command and debugging source codes is not a mandatory training
> for most Civil Engineers. In a word, can we make things easier? :-)
>
I don't have any windows machine by hand where I could test things. But
it there are people creating (and maintaining) the port, I don't see
problem with that. Let me add, though, that I don't have time to
actively support that at this moment, nor do I think it is that
important for yade: it is not mature enough (e.g. compared to pfc) to be
used by people who don't know how to type a command and debug source code.

There are a few problems that will be faced for sure when working on
pure-windows port (no cygwin):
1. scons works under windows, but SConstruct file contains a few
UNIX-isms, like / for path separator and default directories.
2. the plugin loader may have issues (not sure).
3. at a few places, POSIX (but not standard libc) functions are used.
The qt gui has a few calls to xlib functions as well.
4. some gcc extensions are being used (like __attribute__), they will
not work with other compilers.
(5. If windows-specific things begin to complicate source code, the
advantage of relatively homogeneous development platform will be lost
and many devs will grumble about that (me inclusive).)

Regards, Vaclav