MSYS2 support (Thanks to ChatGPT)

[dhaval-hadiya]

thank you @sebsjames for this great library.
i am using MSYS2 UCRT64 tool chain and cmake with ninja to build this library on windows (since Visual Studio is too heavy and MSYS2 provides unix like package manager and it is lightweight). that is why i modified some of your code with the help of chatgpt so that it can be built with MSYS2 toolchain on windows.

here are the changes with the help of chat gpt + trial and error

1. rewrote the maths/sm/process with boost::process to make it cross platform
2. made some changes to mathplot/mplot/VisualFaceBase.h

and the build was successful.

but in maths tests
testbez, testhdfdata1 and testhdfdata5 gave no output
testProcess failed the test with error Exception: Process failed to start even after changing path to windows like path. [i have not dug deeper into that : ) ]
according to ctest all the tests passed except testProcess

now in mathplot every example was working except Helloversion because i haven't installed OpenGL ES
every test passed in mathplot according to ctest

i have attached both modified files as txt here
i hope you or someone experienced c++ programmer can change or optimize this code change since we know chatgpt is not very reliable.
thank you

process.txt
VisualFaceBase.txt

[sebsjames]

Hi, thanks for your message. I'm glad you got most of the programs to work with MSYS2 on Windows. You would be welcome to submit these changes as a pull request so I could review them there - that would be the usual way to do this. However, I can tell you straight away that I will want to avoid any use of the boost library, simply because it is so large and I do not want that additional dependency for the sebsjames/maths library. I would prefer to identify why sm::process fails to compile with MSYS2 and then try to resolve that problem.

Note also that you should attempt not to change all the formatting in code when you submit changes. Because all the formatting and whitespace in your VisualFaceBase.txt is completely different, I can't identify which REAL lines you (or your AI bot) has changed.

[dhaval-hadiya]

hey thanks and sorry for late reply,

i have fixed the formatting in VisualFaceBase.txt and also added mygetprocaddress.h from mplot/wx because i forgot to mention that before.
i also changed line 67 in mplot/wx/viswx.h
from
int version = gladLoadGL (mygetprocaddress);
to
int version = gladLoadGL(reinterpret_cast<GLADloadfunc>(mygetprocaddress));

i mentioned all the errors and modifications in a info.docx file

please review them you can include them in the repository if you see it fit
thank you
info.docx
mygetprocaddress.txt
VisualFaceBase (2).txt

[sebsjames]

Thanks for the work you've done, but the information that ChatGPT has presented is so jumbled up as to be essentially useless to me as a maintainer!

For example, the problem with the process class is this: it should not be compiled on a Windows system. If you take a look in maths/tests/CMakeLists.txt you'll find these lines:

# Test sm::process class
if(APPLE)
  message("-- NB: Omitting testProcess.cpp on Mac for now, as it doesn't work.")
elseif(WIN32)
  message("-- NB: Omitting testProcess.cpp on Windows for now, as it tests the very Unixy Process class.")
else(APPLE)
  add_executable(testProcess testProcess.cpp)
  add_test(testProcess testProcess)
endif(APPLE)

See how the intention of that code is to avoid compiling testProcess.cpp on Windows. So the correct way to fix this error on your system is to either find out why WIN32 is not defined during the build, or to add an additional 'elseif' to that section of CMakeLists.txt to catch a system that is being compiled on MSYS2. The incorrect way to fix it would be to incorporate additional, alien code (boost::process) that makes it compile. ChatGPT did the incorrect thing.

[dhaval-hadiya]

I am really sorry i forgot to mention that i modified test cmakelists to compile testprocess

I tried to compile testprocess.cpp with windows like path but it still did not work.

Thank you