Re: [Kaldi-developers] Windows patches to src/ (mostly)

[Kirill K. <kir...@sm...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jan Trmal [mailto:jt...@gm...]
> Sent: 2015-05-19 0139
> 
> a) we should figure out what versions of MSVC we plan to "support'. For
> example stdint.h is either not supported at all or supported only in
> the most recent versions of the compiler. We should issue compile-time
> warning/error if the version of compiler (probably value of _MSC_VER)
> is not supported

Agreed entirely. Currently, I have tested the build under VS2013 and Intel XE 2015. Do you think we should also support other versions? I can easily try VS2012, probably later this week.

> b) I'm hesitant to accept your stance "we are relying on cygwin".
> Cygwin will be definitely necessary for running the egs, but kaldi
> development and especially development using kaldi libs should not rely
> on cygwin.

Ah, I believe I see where our misunderstanding stems from. What I mean is that the kaldi as a toolkit does depend on Cygwin. It would require an insane amount of work to port the scripts to a Windows-only interpreter (e. g., powershell or cmd), followed by futile effort to support them and keep in-sync. I hope we are on the same page here.

As for building kaldi in native Windows, I agree that the build process should not depend on Cygwin. Currently I am using only MSBuild and Powershell.

> We should facilitate developement of "clean" windows applications
> without needing cygwin runtime to be installed. I actually think it
> would be nice of someone would be willing to contribute some windows
> example (I'm thinking of voxforge or yesno) -- either in powershell) or
> a GUI app, that could take files from kaldi-asr.org and decode a wav or
> a online speech from a microphone.

Very good point. Kaldi is not only a toolkit but also a set of libraries, that should be usable without Cygwin on Windows.

To use windows pipes, we will probably have to detect whether we are running under bash, and, if not, use different popen() logic. Everything else is already ok, since Cygwin filenames are mapped one-way, so if you give a kaldi tool a Windows filename, it still works.

I'll address your points on github separately.

 -kkm