[Developers] GCC 4.4.0 available for Windows

[Arni Magnusson]

Hi everyone,

MinGW released a new stable version of GCC for Windows last week, making a 
significant leap from 3.4.5 (2004) to 4.4.0 (2009). I have upgraded GCC on 
my Windows machine and it builds the current ADMB (svn 286) without a 
problem.

Perhaps it's time for a new ADMB release soon, providing the new user 
scripts (adcomp, adlink, admb) and admb-9.0.x-mingw-gcc4.4.0. If you 
imagine you're a Windows user with GCC 4.4.0 installed, it's unclear 
whether you need to also install GCC 3.4.5 just to use ADMB. Since ADMB is 
a cutting-edge tool, and Windows users can easily upgrade their GCC for 
free, I think the next ADMB release can quickly deprecate GCC 3.4.5 for 
Windows (not Linux).

Installing MinGW GCC 4.4.0 is painful, manually merging 11 different 
packages, with a library version conflict to spice things up. To save ADMB 
users the headscratching/-banging, I have uploaded it, ready for use, at 
http://admb-project.org/community/related-software/gcc.zip/view. I'm not 
advertising it on the mailing list yet, until it's more relevant for ADMB 
users.

An important change introduced with MinGW GCC 4.4.0 is that executables 
need to be linked using the -static flag, if they are to run on all 
Windows machines independent of libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll. For ADMB purposes, 
this means that GCC scripts will probably be different in Windows 
(-static) versus Linux (no such flag). Other changes are more positive, 
including improved support for modern processor capabilities.

As a side note, I'm preparing an update of ADMB-IDE that I will name 
either 3.4.5-6 or 4.4.0-1, depending on how things go.

All the best,

Arni