[Chicken-users] difficulty of ECL on Windows

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Ian Oversby wrote:
> > After struggling horribly, trying (and failing) to get ECL running in 
> > Windows I am really
> > looking for a better experience. 

Can you please relate the difficulties you had?  I am forever weighing 
in on matters of "Lisp or Scheme?" in comp.lang.lisp and 
comp.lang.scheme.  My mantra has been, "There are no good compiled open 
source Common Lisps on Windows."  I dismissed ECL a year ago, figuring 
if it didn't use Windows suffix conventions for its nmake files, it 
couldn't be all that Windows oriented.  I made some obstreperous public 
statements about this at the time.  My dismissal may have been unfair, 
which is why I've been giving it the benefit of the doubt in public 
statements lately.  But if it sucked for you, I'd like to know exactly 
what lengths you went to, in trying to get it to work.  Then I could 
render an accurate opinion on ECL, and solidify my general claim, "There 
are no good compiled open source Common Lisps on Windows."  And get 
Chicken converts.

I'll change my tune when SBCL actually works on Windows.  And I'm not 
helping them.  Not out of any mean-spiritedness, but I did just spend 9 
months to implement first-class Windows build support on Chicken.  I 
want to use my investment, not churn.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every