Why is it compiling GMP so hard?

[Sisyphus]

Paul Leyland wrote:

> 
> Face it: installing a high-performance version of GMP on the Windows
> platform is hard work and, IMO, much harder work than it needs to be. 
> It is very Unix-centric (to forestall opposing claims, I am well aware
> that it can be got to work on non-Unix systems) and if you don't have a
> Unix box you have to go out of your way to make it look like Unix. 

That's a fairly perverse idea of going "out of your way". It takes a lot 
less time to download and install MSYS than it does to install Visual 
Studio.

As far as I can see, installing GMP on Win32 is trivial - and making 
that trivially-built GMP workable with Visual Studio (if that's what you 
want) is even more trivial.

Or - is there a performance hit involved here ?
In other words, what is gained by building GMP the way Brian does it ?

Cheers,
Rob