I actually posted my questions to you on the Chicken list. But since
you have replied privately, I'll reply privately. If that was an
accident, and you meant to discuss things publically, we can regroup
there.
Bob McIsaac wrote:
Brandon wrote:
1) do you care about building stuff on Windows? Is this actually
important to you, or are you one of those Unix-only types?
I use XP at work, linux at home, sometimes booting win98 to research
ideas
I can bring to work. For Scheme, I need to use the FFI on windows to
access hardware such as serial ports. But I have trouble compiling
Scheme
on win98 where I do preliminary stuff.
Good to know you're actually motivated by a desire for working Windows
solutions. I sure hate hearing from Unix guys who don't care and just
want Windows to go away.
2) what do you propose as a "separate Windows build system,"
considering that Windows has many compilers, all requiring different
build systems? Are you proposing anything other than "well I was
just going to support my own favorite compiler and leave other
people hanging" ?
Cygwin is ponderous and slow, Mingw is complicated, the free VC++ won't
install on win98. I believe Watcom would work for everyone.
All these compilers have different licensing, toolchain, and support
issues associated with them. For instance, I have been driven
primarily by "what's not GPLed and works with Eclipse," and that
happens to be only MinGW. Watcom has a decidedly marginal user
community. I don't see your claim as in any way realistic. People
don't need just a Scheme-only solution, where the backend compiler
doesn't matter. They need to do a lot of FFI stuff, and library
linkage stuff, and IDE support stuff, and
other-people-will-maintain-this-crap stuff. Then the other toolchains
matter a great deal. The C universe of a Scheme-to-C compiler is
relevant.
3) do you actually know anything about CMake?
I just visited the web site. It looks impressive.
Let me impress you further. We have working CMake builds for Chicken,
thanks in no small part to the direct assistance of the pricipal CMake
author. You can't beat that kind of business relationship. The only
reason you don't see the build in the tarball is because Xmas was
hectic, New Year's is still hectic, and I need to take the proper
steps of documenting it up and so forth. You either subscribed to the
Chicken list very recently, or have been ignoring my posts, or don't
read archives before suggesting new courses of action. I've been
posting about this CMake stuff for a good 3 months now.
Looks like watcom could be
included in the Templates where MSC and bsc32 now exist.
Sure, if you do the work. They seem to be amenable to that sort of
thing. For instance, they added a MinGW-specific target the other
day, for no particular reason that I could discern. I guess they
thought that would make their lives easier. What would you gain from
making this effort? Well, if you want more people to use Watcom, then
people already using CMake wouldn't have to do anything special to
give Watcom a whirl. They'd just retarget for Watcom, and if they
like it, they'll keep it. Of course, my agenda is to get more people
using CMake in the 1st place. The mission is to supplant GNU
Autoconf, and I see SCons as the principal competition we have to
address.
4) are you doing, or going to do, any real work to resolve
cross-platform build issues?
I created a watcom makefile for Gambit.. there wasn't much interest
there.
The one for Chicken is much more difficult given the different
libraries and
objects that are linked together in various ways. It's about 90%
complete.
I need to understand the chicken architecture in order to complete it.
I might be able to contribute to Cmake when I know more about it.
If you're interested in the latter, I can assist you with that. If
only politically, but that does matter. I'm part of CMake-Promote,
after all. It would help your cause if you could point out some
Watcom showcase projects, though. Like, apps and libraries that
effectively demonstrate why people should like / care about Watcom.
Most people think it's a dead compiler and a dead company. What
proves otherwise?
If you aren't into CMake, you and I are going to find ourselves on
opposite sides of the build issue. I'm probably going to end up being
the Windows build-and-test guy. I'll tell you frankly, I won't build
and test anything on Windows that isn't CMake. So if you're really
determined to do it "the Watcom way," you'll be doing it all
yourself. Failing to leverage other people, often leads to
substandard releases, which in turn leads to user apathy about a
particular build. Unless of course you really really have lotsa extra
time on your hands, to stay on top of things and make other people
happy with your Watcom stuff.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
- Ed McKenzie