Re: [Chicken-users] Win32 maintainer needed.. Mingw install?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Bob McIsaac wrote:

> I tried MinGw and found it wasn't "the simplest thing that could
> possibly work" (as Ward Cunningham might say).  That is the fate
> of Unix tools on the Windows platform... compromises, work arounds,
> and special cases are inevitable resulting in some obfuscation.

Yes... it's a pity that advanced programming languages almost always 
come from a Unix pedigree.  So something that understands GNU Autoconf 
is usually needed.  Chicken was no exception in this regard, although in 
time I hope to wean it of Autoconf.  Anyways, that's why MinGW ends up 
mattering.  Well, really Cygwin is what the academics use for Windows 
"support."  They're not shipping end user applications and so don't care 
about the GPL implications of cygwin1.dll.  So someone like me comes 
along, finds a good academic language, and adds or boosts the MinGW 
support to remove the GPL encumberance.  That said, language academics 
do tend to support VC++.  I'm not sure if anyone else does though, i.e. 
does GNU Emacs / XEmacs work with VC++?  Eclipse doesn't.  Generally, 
Visual Studio is a bad universe for open source stuff.  There are no 
modes for funky languages, not unless someone got some funding to do a 
.NET version.  Which happens, but that's about using the Common Language 
Runtime, not generating native code.  I'm a 3D game developer, I want 
native code.

I have never encountered Watcom on my various open source food chains.  
I don't claim to have tried all problem domains; rather, my interests 
have been narrowly focused on (1) 3D game development on Windows, (2) 
high performance languages.  Is there some domain where Watcom has 
claims to fame?


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
I won't spend more than 1 day configuring 1 thing.