Re: [EXT] Guile 64-bit Windows support, redux

[Mike Gran]

On Tuesday, June 6, 2023 at 02:10:25 PM PDT, Thompson, David 
<dthompson2@worcester.edu> wrote: 

...

>> Janneke has also poked at Windows support a few times as well, and
>> he actually got it to run on 64-bit Windows.

>Did JIT work? When I tried this years ago it didn't. Would be a major
>victory if it works now.

There were patches that made it compile, but, I don't think it ever
properly worked.  I always build without JIT.
I haven't tried to build with JIT in a while.

...

> I'm obviously not a maintainer but I do want to be vocal in my support
> for a good Windows story.  Despite how much I personally do not want
> to use Windows, I do want users who do to be able to run my software.

Same.
...

> WSL is cool and all, but personally I want to ship native Windows
> stuff that "just works" as much as possible.  I'm not sure what the 
> graphics story is like on WSL these days, but in the past dealing with
> X11 compatibility and GPUs was not easy, or so I've heard. So for me,
> I'd really like to see the MinGW build work acceptably (threads, JIT,
> etc.)  Building with MSVC would be even better but I'll take what I
> can get. :) I just get jealous whenever I look at some new language
> implementation (or just some other Scheme) and see that it can do
> native Windows, Linux, and MacOS builds.

I have seen guile-gi launch a program on MinGW using MinGW's
Gtk libraries.  I have no benchmarks.

I did attempt a build with MSVC (which is a nightmare because you have
to run autoconf in MSYS and use a batch script to translate gcc
flags into cl flags). It looked pretty bad: so many compilation errors.
I think you'd have to fix all of gnulib and then pull all of gnulib
into Guile, haha.

-Mike