----- Original Message ----- From: "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > A Cygwin build of SAGE is the closest thing to "native SAGE" that I think > we'll ever see on any version of Microsoft Windows.
Cygwin's build of SAGE is certainly a great thing - and I am using it. > Cygwin is an implementation of such an environment for Windows, and > code that is built in the cygwin environment is native -- unless it > makes system calls that cygwin has to turn into equivalent windows > calls. E.g., gmp is pretty fast in Cygwin, since it's all low level > arithmetic, which doesn't involve such system calls. Performance is only a small part of the problems related to using cygwin or other POSIX environments for Windows. The main problem is inconvenience. For instance, such a simple task as copying and pasting that can be done between Windows applications just by clicking Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V becomes very complicated when one of the application works on Windows (such as email, a text editor, or a web browser), and onother one - in a cygwin shell (it works more or less smooth in the direction from cygwin to Windows, but becomes much more complicated in the opposite direction.) > Probably some people will email back that there are other POSIX > environments > for Windows, or that the SAGE developers "should" rewrite components of > SAGE > to build natively in Visual Studio for Windows. Well, I wouldn't say what SAGE developers "should" or "should not" do. There is just a hope that SAGE could be modified in such a way that its front end (written in pure Python that doesn't require much of Visual Studio building) could be installed as a Python library into the native Windows Python and run in native Windows python shells and IDEs, such as IDLE. What happens with the back end (I mean such things as Maxima, Singular, or PARI) - whether parts of it are built natively or in cygwin - is not that important. > Getting SAGE to work at all > in Linux itself has already been a hugely difficult problem. To rewrite > things > to work with Visual Studio, say, would be a herculean task... and at the > end > of the day would almost certainly be worse performance-wise than just > using > vmware (and Linux) under windows. That's, probably, true. Alec --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
