Re: [Chicken-users] Windows Build

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Joshua Griffith wrote:

Hello,

I'm attempting to build Chicken 2.5 on Windows XP SP2 (running under Parallels on a MacBook Pro) with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2.  I was able to successfully configure Chicken using CMAKE, open the resulting project file in VC++, and start a win32 release build, but it just seems to hang for hours (with the chicken-boot.exe process consuming 99% of the virtual processor and about 1,424 KB of memory).  Any idea as to what I might be doing wrong?

I'm inclined to say this is the fault of your Parallels virtual machine.  Try using CMake to compile CMake.  http://www.cmake.org  If CMake chokes and dies, then probably any large build is going to choke and die.

There was some issue with VC++ doing something stupid with all of Chicken's generated C functions, like thrashing the memory and so forth.  Haven't seen that problem lately.  Maybe your VM is more sensitive to it.  Maybe VC++ 2005 Express is a crappy compiler.  If it isn't too huge I'll try to download and install it.  Right now it's not downloading for some reason, although I'm otherwise accessing the net just fine.

It would be interesting to know if your virtual machine has problems with either the MinGW or Cygwin builds of Chicken.  You'd need to set up one of those environments to find out.  Cygwin is trivial to set up, so I'd try that.

I did successfully compile Chicken on the same machine within OS X in a few minutes.  Alternatively, does anyone have a Windows binary that I can download? 

The problem is, Chicken hardwires your installation paths at compile time.  This means we can't make Windows binaries that can be installed to arbitrary directories.  It would have to always be C:\Program Files\Chicken.  This is very likely to piss off a lot of Windows users, that they can't choose their installation directory, so we removed the binaries.  Better to have a configurable source build than a crippled binary.

Is there a simpler way to use Chicken to produce a win32 binary?

Well, the build is simple enough, isn't it?  It just isn't working on your virtual machine.  A performance issue, not a complication issue.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every