NOTE: [http://www.apcocoa.org/wiki/ApCoCoALib:CompilationInstructions Some other useful information]

a sage without bzip2 would be possible...; saved objects under unix/osx wouldn't load though.

trivial -- just a pickle

good!

upstream merging probably isn't as hard as you think. The NTL author is a number theorist that many of "us", e.g,. John Cremona, know well.

Maintainer = John Cremona = has never used Windows, as far as I know. Porting is reasonable.

Main developer -- Bill Hart -- uses Windows all the time.

maybe there is a native windows library that provides similar functionality. This is only needed so Twisted works with Python, and I'm *sure* that is already very well supported.

yep, something builtin to windows might be useful.

yep, very very good support on windows

Boothby told me this swig-generated "crap" will be removed from sage soon, he hopes.

this won't be hard, since iml is just clean C code, mostly concerned with mat

*definitely* will work fine.

could be hard.

I'm sure this will work -- it is also part of what the enthought people distribute for windows.

will be easy

[[yes, this is the biggie. note that pexpect *does* sort of work under cygwin, which might be relevant. Also, instead of porting pexpect, it might be possible to simply do something completely different than accomplishes much the same thing. pexpect was the way to go with Python and Unix -- in windows perhaps there is a totally different approach to interprocess communication that would work better? It's possibly OK if this means rewriting SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage/sage/interfaces/* for this new approach. This definitely needs to be investigated.

Some of the programs Sage interfaces with have native "client server" archicture, and that could perhaps be used instead. E.g., Maple and Mathematica do. Maxima almost certainly doesn't...]]

maybe trivial??

my impression from cython-devel is that there are already numerous windows users of cython

probably easy

This is probably quite hard. And interesting. At least singular builds under cygwin, which is a good sign, I guess.

worrisome.

worry?

worry??

They don't already have a native MSVC port? Wow. That's amazing.

easy?

worrisome.

maxima is often used under windows, so we should figure out their prefered lisp. We only use clisp for maxima.

easy, probably; it's just math

we should upgrade to 0.2.3 first

a cygwin build could be fine for us, since there is no binary linking between sage and gap, and almost certainly there never will be any.