Re: [Chicken-hackers] Bare minimum of work to get Chicken linking under native Windows

[Mario Domenech Goulart]

Hello Joshua,

Sorry for the long time to reply, and for the general uselessness of my
message (I'm not a Windows user myself).  Please, see some comments
below.

On Mon, 19 Feb 2018 09:57:33 -0500 Joshua Robbins <address@hidden> wrote:

> Chicken may not build under native Windows, but it builds under MinGW
> just fine, and the libraries produced by building chicken under MinGW
> can be linked to in non-MinGW-built applications. I have a large C
> application that builds under native Windows, and I'd like to use
> Chicken in it. I can successfully take libchicken.a and convert it to
> a .lib file, but there is still one problem with this, however, and
> it's the header files.
>
> You can link to Chicken just fine, but the header files themselves
> depend on a sufficiently POSIX-like environment to run. For example,
> unistd.h isn't there at all. The simplest solution I can think of is
> to make shim header files that include declarations Chicken needs (and
> nothing else, since MinGW has already taken care of the
> implementations for us).

What toolchain do you use for those native Windows builds?

> If I do make these shim header files, would you all be interested in
> having this be a part of Chicken somehow, perhaps as a new platform in
> the makefile? Or would it be better to modify chicken.h directly, if I
> would contribute at all?

Would you have an estimate on how big this change would be?  If it's not
very invasive, maybe it can be done in chicken.h (just guessing -- I
have absolutely no clue).

One recurrent problem we have with Windows is that we have very few
developers using this platform (as far as I can tell, none of the core
developers regularly uses Windows), so our testing and debugging
capabilities are very limited.  Nevertheless, contributions are always
welcome, naturally.  Feel free to send proof-of-concept patches, so we
can find out the best way to integrate your contributions in to CHICKEN.

All the best.
Mario
-- 
http://parenteses.org/mario