An obsolete version of Octave (2.1.73) is part of the normal net
distribution of Cygwin, available from http://www.cygwin.com.  Check
the package list in Cygwin's setup.exe installer if you would like to
try using it.  However, 2.1.73 is unsupported and we STRONGLY
recommended that you use a more recent version of Octave.

It should be possible to build Octave on Windows systems with Cygwin,
but at the time of this writing, there are some performance problems
related to the way C++ exception handling is implemented with the
default Cygwin compiler.  This is a known problem with a long history.
If you would like to see this problem corrected, please search the
Cygwin mailing lists for threads related to "sjlj exception handling"
(or similar).

There are also two "unofficial" Octave distributions for Cygwin:

 1. http://www.geocities.jp/tmacchant

    The binaries here are built using gcc-3.4.4-3 configured with
    --disable-sjlj-exceptions.  Performance is improved by using DWARF
    exception handling instead of setjump/longjump exception
    handling.  However, to build dynamically loaded .oct files that
    will work with this version of Octave, you must use the same
    specially configured version of GCC that was used to build Octave
    itself and not the version of GCC that is distributed with
    Cygwin.

    This binary is maintained by Tatsuro Matsuroka.


 2. http://matzeri.altervista.org

    The binaries here aim to be an officail cygwin distribution of
    Octave-3.0.x and are built using the version of GCC distributed
    with Cygwin.  Performance of linear algebra functions is fine, but
    the performance of the scripting language interpreter suffers
    because of the setjump/longjump exception handling model used in
    the version of GCC distributed with Cygwin.  The advantage is that
    you don't need a special version of GCC.

    This binary is maintained by Marco Atzeri

We hope that Cygwin will eventually have a version of GCC that does
not suffer from the performance problem related to setjump/longjump
exception handling.


John W. Eaton
jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering

Tatsuro MATSUOKA 
tmacchant@yahoo.co.jp
Department of Molecular Design and Engineering, 
Gradudate School of Engineering, Nagoya University.

Last updated: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:01:48 EDT