Re: [EXT] relocatable guile on windows

[Thompson, David]

Hi Mike,

On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 9:49 PM Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Guile,
>
> The Lisp Game Jam was a few weeks ago, and in prep, I took a stab an
> making Guile work better on Windows, using MinGW MSys64 UCRT64 for
> compilation. Little did I imagine that it would take a couple months
> to make something servicable, so I never got around to actually making
> a game.
>
> This Guile is a fork with a lot of hacks for Windows: lack of
> POSIX shell, DLL nonsense, Windows filesystem instead of FHS,
> yadda yadda yadda.  The biggest hack is that of making
> all the file paths relative to the guile executable, so that
> it can be distributed as a single zip file or MSIX install file.

I haven't had a chance to try this out yet but I wanted to say that
this is great work!  I'd really like to have a good story to tell for
shipping games built with Guile and Chickadee on Windows.  In the past
I've tried to cross-compile Guile for Windows from Linux and made it
as far as getting Guile 3 to boot, but the JIT didn't work and I think
threads, though enabled, were broken.  I haven't used Windows for
development in over 10 years so I'm somewhat helpless when things go
wrong.

It would be really great if we could organize a bit around upstreaming
patches for proper Windows support and come up with some documentation
with official recommendations for how to build for Windows.  I never
know what the best approach is: cygwin? mingw? native build (more work
than the other two)?  A lot of other Scheme implementations run on
Windows, so Guile should, too.

- Dave