Exe file in File exchange

Hi,

Is it possible to host and share compiled exe matlab application in File Exchange?

Thanks

[David Barry]

I'm not sure (I suspect not) but why would you want to do this? This is completely against the File Exchange philosophy and doesn't help anybody. The idea of sharing code is that people can look at it to take inspiration and learn from it. If you want to share then make it shareable!

[John D'Errico]

I agree with David. Why do so? Making it a .exe greatly decreases the number of people who can use it. It is also dangerous to download, since then you might be interested in including something dangerous, like a virus into the system of others who would download it. As such, this makes it a terribly bad idea that we strongly discourage. Of course, YOU personally would never do such a nasty thing, but how do we know? How can we trust you?

How about help? Making it a .exe disables the help system in MATLAB.

Sorry, but no. Even if you can do so, I'd give any such submission 1 star only if I saw it, simply for the above reasons alone, and I think many others would agree.

Answer 1

[Jan]

In the past compiled executables have sometimes been allowed in the FEX and sometimes not. One of the problems is the possible existence of malware inside the compiled code. But a virus checker should find such problems easily. So it is a more severe problem that compiled code is less compatible with different versions of Matlab, operating systems and processors. E.g. if the machine the file is compiled on has a SSE3 or AVX unit, but your machine has not. In addition MEX files are not guaranteed to work with any other Matlab version than the one they have been compiled with, although I have not observed incompatibilities over many different versions.

For me running code compiled on another machine is not an option, because it is much harder to debug. But this matters only, if the source files are not provided.

You still find compiled executables in the FileExchange. Some are hidden inside M-files in the comment section. If you run the code, it reads it's own source and copies the contents of the comments to a binary file. Brrr. Ugly.

Many users of the FileExchange have problems with installing a compiler correctly. There have been different problems and bugs in the installation procedure of the Microsoft-SDK in many versions. Therefore my solution is to post the source code in the FileExchange and add a link to a page on my server containing compiled files for some operating systems and Matlab versions.