Re: [Chicken-users] stable version?

[Shawn Rutledge]

On 9/21/07, Dan Muresan <address@hidden> wrote:
> > No it's not gone - didn't you see the other thread about Cygwin and MinGW?
>
> Well, Cygwin and/or MinGW is not what most "normal" people understand
> when they say "Windows support". They mean "Visual C". Is that gone?

Yes I believe so.  But whoever feels motivated could write a Makefile
that works with nmake.  I don't know if I will get around to trying
that or not.

I don't understand why cmake was dropped.  Was it hard to maintain
too?  The build process changed so much from 2.6 to 2.7 that it got
broken?  It's nice that it's so simple to just run make now, on Linux
(no autoconf stuff necessary, and no need for an old chicken, thank
goodness), but cmake was supposed to make it more portable.  Maybe it
was a case of the cure being worse than the disease...

I'm mainly a Linux guy, like to avoid using Windows whenever possible,
but at every day job since I started my professional career, most of
the time I've had to run Windows (proprietary tools not available on
Linux, etc.)  So I'm interested in seeing Chicken remain portable.
Some day I will have portable apps written in Scheme (with GUIs, too!)
which I'd like to be able to run on several platforms.  When that
happens, if the apps are also useful to others, it will no longer be
correct to say that Chicken is only for developers.  Binary
distributions will become more important.  But probably it's OK if
they are compiled with MinGW, since no extra DLLs would be required.
I will have to try it with MinGW instead of Cygwin one of these days
to understand the process.