Building ASCEND for 64-bit Windows

There are a number of barriers to building ASCEND on 64-bit Windows:

• PyGTK for 64-bit may have some bugs (http://www.daa.com.au/pipermail/pygtk/2009-July/017278.html)
• SCons does not distribute an installer that works against 64-bit Python
• Windows platform-specific code so far assumes 32-bit mode.

We are working towards fixing these items.

Steps to date

• install MSYS bundle to c:\msys as instructed here
• install MinGW-64 bundle to c:\mingw64 as instructed (we used mingw-w64-bin_i686-mingw_20111220.zip
• install 64-bit Python 2.7.2
• append /c/Python27 and /c/Python27/Scripts to the PATH in MSYS.
• download and extract source tarball for SCons 1.2.0. Build via python setup.py bdist_wininst then install resulting .exe in dist subfolder.
• create 'scons' file in c:\Python27\Scripts containing

#!/bin/sh
python /c/Python27/Scripts/scons.py $*

• svn checkout ASCEND source code (from trunk)
• scons

Test suite

• The CUnit test suites seem to be basically working.
• Suite 'utilities_ascEnvVar' current crashing.

Python bindings

• Installed SWIG 1.3.40
• Seems to be an issue with linking to python27.lib. The problem may be that described here, or it could be a 64-bit specific problem (or both). Perhaps we should try what happens with Python 2.5 alternatively.

Things we need to work on:

• A lot of new compiler warnings due to the very new GCC version used by MinGW-64 that will need to be worked through.
• Installing the MinGW-64 toolchain with 'standard' (local) tool filenames (maybe a quick script to rename or symlink them?)
• Detecting 32-bit vs 64-bit Windows
• config.h.in etc for size of void * etc.
• Detecting Python linker flags
• Building PyGTK etc for our version of Python
• Packaging it all (will NSIS 32-bit be OK to use?)
• Conversions between 'void *' and 'unsigned long' don't seem to work on Win64. Instead, Windows wants 'void *' to be cast to 'unsigned long long', since those pointers are the same size.

Cunit

• use SVN trunk code
• ./configure --prefix=/mingw --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --build=mingw32
• make install

SUNDIAL

SUNDIALS is used by the IDA solver in ASCEND.

• ./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --prefix=/mingw
• make -j4
• make install

IPOPT

• download the source tarball
• ./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --enable-shared --prefix=/mingw
• make -j4
• make install

GDB

• Download the GDB package from the MinGW-64 site here (we chose http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/External%20binary%20packages%20%28Win64%20hosted%29/gdb/x86_64-w64-mingw32-gdb-7.1.90.20100730.zip/download x86_64-w64-mingw32-gdb-7.1.90.20100730.zip])
• Building GDB from source tarball version 7.3.1 worked OK but the resulting GDB didn't recognise/load symbols from the running executable. So download the MinGW-64 pre-compiled version instead.