Thursday, October 17, 2013

Somebody compile stuff for me

Ok, so if I'd been keeping a list it would be like a mile long, but I haven't been and thus do not remember all the stuff but I've noticed an annoying trend amoung programmers in that they seem to assume that everyone else is a programmer too when, news flash here, we're not.  So they'll say something like a program "should compile on any platform that supports it with minimal changes."  Ok, yay, non-programmer here, how?

I understand why programmers release source and whatnot rather than compiled code, I'm on Windows 7, other people are on Macs, others are on open source systems, others are on the thing with the thing and the thing.  It's not usually practical to compile a finished version of the program for every version of every operating system in use.

The problem is that for those of us who know nothing it means we can do nothing because we have no idea how to put the building blocks together.

At the moment I only remember two of the plethora of things this has come up with:
Buddhabrot renderer
Interpolate plugin for Gimp

Can anyone make me a version I can run on my machine?

4 comments:

  1. Do you have a language setup on which you can already compile and run code? What is it?

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    1. The answer is sort of: yes, no, maybe, and I can. One of the things about this computer is that the hard drive was replaced, but the data not lost, so I'm constantly finding out that things I thought were installed aren't actually installed. They're there, but not in working order. The only two things that I know for sure that are in working order at this instant are perl and those things that come with Windows 7 by default.

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      The thing about the Gimp plugin is that once it is a plugin, rather than the source code for one, Gimp itself will do all the work of running the code. (Gimp's native language is, I think, C.)

      As for the other one, I have no idea where to even start.

      Like I said, not a programmer. That was my mother.

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  2. It ought to be possible for me to reimplement the fractal stuff in Perl, but not for a couple of weeks at the very least. (Will be away most of next week+end.)

    Comments to the Gimp plugin appeared to be posting links to compiled versions. I haven't had anything to do with Gimp plugins.

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    1. It ought to be possible for me to reimplement the fractal stuff in Perl, but not for a couple of weeks at the very least. (Will be away most of next week+end.)

      I would be very grateful.

      Comments to the Gimp plugin appeared to be posting links to compiled versions. I haven't had anything to do with Gimp plugins.

      Yes it does, but that wasn't working because of what appeared to be, but I'm now wondering if it might not have been, a version mismatch of Windows. Then, as I was typing this post, it occurred to me that there was one computer I hadn't tried it on. It works on the computer with the broken screen.

      Not ideal, but I'll take what I can get.

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