Re: Do you think this would work? Gnu-win a static swarm!

[Nelson Minar]

>I was just browsing the linux newsgroups and the attached memo should
>appear.  Here's a thought. Compile swarm with the --static option.  The
>FAQ says it should put everything in a single executable.  THen
>torture the damn thing with this GNU-Win32 software.

I think you misunderstand. As far as I know, GNU-WIN32 doesn't take a
Linux binary and make it run under Windows. It allows you to compile
(some) Linux sources under Windows and have the binary run there.

It's a pretty nice chunk of work, but last I checked it was still very
beta. Their version of bash, for instance, crashes regularly. There's
a hope that Swarm would work this way, but it won't be easy.


To answer John Eikenberry's question about why not use Tcl/Tk for
platform independence, I sometimes wonder that myself. In theory, it
is portable - that's why we used it in the first place. A bit of code
in Swarm relies on the underlying X windows (Raster, mostly) but the
rest of it should in theory be portable to the same places Tcl/Tk are
portable.

In practice, though, it hasn't worked out that way. Most users find
installing Tcl/Tk to be hard. I haven't heard good things about the
Windows ports of those tools.

The rewrite in Java provides some interesting opportunities. If
Microsoft doesn't keep playing games with trying to control Java, then
the Java-Swarm code should be nicely portable.

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