[Numpy-discussion] Installation info

[David Cournapeau]

Gael Varoquaux wrote:
>
> I was just wondering, could we ask Microsoft for some help here. A build
> bot, or a Windows 64 license... They are helping porting the SAGE project
> to windows, so they do have interest in getting open source scientific
> software working on windows.
>   

Windows 64 is actually the easiest problem: you can find free trial 
license for Windows server 2008 on MS website.

The main problem is the compiler and BLAS/LAPACK: mingw cannot target 64 
bits yet (there is a mingw-w64 project, but after some digging, I found 
out that it was legally dubious, hence not integrated yet in the 'real' 
mingw project). Now, you could think about using MS compiler, but I 
don't like the idea very much, and there is the problem of blas/lapack. 
cygwin, already slow, is dog slow on windows 64 (because it runs in 32 
bits, I guess ?), and is needed to build atlas (blas and lapack too, but 
it is at least theoretically possible to build them without makefiles; 
atlas build system is so complicated that it makes autotools feel 
extremely enjoyable).

cheers,

David