[Developers] GCC 4.5 for Windows

[Arni Magnusson]

I've just uploaded MinGW GCC 4.5.0 for Windows to the 
http://admb-project.org/community/related-software/gcc webpage.

This MinGW GCC release is not a long stride forward like the last one, 
that took us from 3.4.5 (2004) to 4.4.0 (2009), but 4.5.0 (2010) is the 
current version and I suggest we use it to build the next ADMB release for 
Windows.

Among small but noticable changes are (1) explicit warning if -static is 
not passed, and (2) the optional Java component is not available, unlike 
MinGW GCC 3.4.5 and 4.4.0.

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While merging the 18 required MinGW packages, I noticed a couple of them 
are related to parallel computing, a current topic in ADMB development:

   libgomp (Open Multi-Processing) for shared memory multiprocessing
   libpthread (POSIX Threads) for creating and manipulating threads

I don't know the first thing about parallel computing, but just wanted to 
flag these libraries as something that has recently become a part of the 
basic MinGW GCC distribution. The compiler arguments -mthread and 
-mthreads seem to be specific to Windows. Another library I've heard of is

   pvm (Parallel Virtual Machine) to run on a heterogeneous network

which Dave Fournier has experimented with using ADMB. It can be seen in 
ADMB command line argument -pvmtime and throughout the ADMB source code.

Arni