Compiled binaries of GAP for Windows for dynamic loading of modules

On this page I publish compiled binaries of the GAP kernel that use a DLL-based approach contrary to the binary which is distributed with the main GAP distribution. This leads to the fact that these binaries can dynamically load compiled modules. Thus, one can use the EDIM, IO, and Browse packages. The archives provided below already contain compiled code from those packages.

Please make sure that you use the binaries that fit exactly to the version of GAP and the packages you are using! Also, all this is highly experimental stuff! You have been warned.

One easy way to obtain all this is Alexander Konovalov's Experimental GAP Installer for Windows, which now contains a self-extracting archive with the binaries provided here.

If you want to install manually, simply download an archive below and unzip it onto your drive C: in the topmost directory C:\ where the directory gap4r4 of your GAP installation resides. Then start GAP by clicking on C:\gap4r4\bin\gapp.pif. You might want to copy this file to some other location or create a link.

Note that I am usually using the latest version of Cygwin, the version I have used is noted in the column "Cygwin" in the above table. This information is crucial since it seems that there may only be running one version of cygwin1.dll at the same time in a Windows system. That means that if you have installed another version of that DLL and have some process running that is using that installed version, then the binaries provided here will no longer run. It is also possible that I use another version of Cygwin than the one used to compile the Windows binary in the main GAP distribution. However, my archives overwrite all binaries coming from the main distribution upon installation. Also the binary gapw95.exe which overwrites the one provided in the main GAP distribution contains the code coming from the packages EDIM, IO and Browse. This was necessary because otherwise it crashes whenever one of these packages is loaded. Thus also with the version of GAP started by gap.bat these packages work.

Of course, there is no warranty whatsoever that these binaries work or do what I claim. If however, something is going wrong you can try to email me:

neunhoef AT mcs.st-and.ac.uk.