RE: [Gcl-devel] Windows

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Camm.

| Despite these valiant efforts, I've recently been reminded of the fact
| that our windows port lags in several respects behind the posix ports.
| I must confess that I am so philosophically opposed to the entire
| closed source paradigm that I would prefer to ignore windows entirely.
| It does appear, however, that some lisp/gcl users are still stuck in
| this world and would benefit from a more robust gcl port in this area.
| There is no way that I will ever acquire my own windows machine, but
| I'd like to repeat my earlier offer of working on the gcl windows port
| if someone could provide remote ssh access.  There must be some way to
| do this I'd think given all the cygwin stuff available.

I'm looking this up at the moment, I'll discuss this privately when i have a
better idea.

| I've also heard that there is a mingw emulator already packaged for
| Debian.  I might be persuaded to look into this if someone in the know
| can assure me that work done in this environment will be applicable to
| the real windows/mingw environment.

It is perfectly feasible to cross-compile to a MinGW32 target:

   http://www.mingw.org/mingwfaq.shtml

You will, however, have to run your final executable under Windows or some
emulator such as Wine.  (I believe there is a commercial system which offers
a  free demo for Linux, but I can't remember its name.)

The Wine environment is not a reliable indicator of proper functionality on
Windows.  It is allegedly possible to check for segfaults using a Wine
process under Valgrind.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.