[Mingw-users] GMP windows64 porting effort

[Torbjorn G. <tg...@gm...>]

Hello,

I believe GMP (The GNU multiple precision arithmetic library) in its
latest incarnation (release series 5.0) support 64-bit MinGW, but only
rudimentarly.

We plan to improve the support.  I nor any other of the GMP developers
are Windows users, so please forgive some naivety.

Currently (i think) GMP configures and builds under MinGW-64, but GMP's
performance leaves a lot to be desired, mainly since the GMP x86_64
assembly does not work with Windows64's calling conventions.  (GMP's
performance is very dependent on assembly code, unfortunately.)

We'd like to improve things in a two steps:

(1) Make the existing assembly code work by adding a rather simple layer
    of abstraction to it.  We will still require a bash-type shell and
    other unix-like commands, like e.g., m4 and make.

(2) Perhaps make things work, at least to some degree, with a more
    Windowsy environment.

Questions:

Do people here agree that GMP works today (w/o assembly)?  Can indeed
MinGW-64 run configure and 'make'?  Would I need to install external
software, e.g., (parts of) Cygwin to make it work?

For step (1) above, will one have m4 from MinGW, or will that require
external software (e.g., Cygwin)?  Do you see any other potential
problems?

I will worry about (2) at a later point.  The idea here is to not depend
on Unixisms, whatever that means.  Gcc from MinGW will certainly still
be useful (I suppose gcc can be run from within such systems as "Visual
Studio"?)

(I am not at this list, please retain any CC to me.)

PS. Which is the recommened way to get started with mingw?  I find
sources, but I really don't want to mess with setting up a cross
compiltion environment at this early stage.  Should I install by means
of Cygwin's installer?

-- 
Torbjörn