Re: [Chicken-users] Win32 maintainer needed

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Bob McIsaac wrote:

> My main goal is to use Scheme on Linux and win32 without any fuss.  I
> don't have a Watcom agenda.. it just appears to be best maintained of
> the free win32 compilers.  

That point, I do not understand or agree with.  Cygwin is clearly the 
best maintained free compiler, used by the most people, best packaged, 
largest deployment, largest support community, best toolchain 
compatibility, etc.  It works great, but the problem is you get stuck 
with a GPL when you use it.  Sure, technically you can compile things 
with -mno-cygwin, but nobody does and all the libraries are stacked.  
So, it's a nightmare when you try to buck the trend.

Between MinGW and Watcom, MinGW is clearly better supported with a 
larger community.  I've been all over open source land, I've seen tons 
and tons of projects that support MinGW, and no Watcom at all.  Now, for 
all I know Watcom may be a better *compiler*, like for optimization and 
whatnot, but it certainly isn't beating anybody on support issues.  
Rather, it is marginal.  I'd like to hear some bullet points about why 
anyone should / would care about Watcom.

> And my options are limited because I have win98.

If that's the driving issue, it's not one that most of us care about.  
This is 2006.  Even my Windows 2000 installation is looking venerable, 
but unlike 16-bit Windows it's reliable.  Suggest you steal a more 
modern Windows from a friend of yours.  It may be suicide to move to XP, 
but HW of the Win98 era will probably run Windows 2000 fine, if you 
update your BIOS first.

> PS: has anyone tried http://visual-mingw.sourceforge.net/ ?
> It makes installing mingw much easier.

Haven't.  I'm usually leery of alpha quality projects.  How is it going 
for you?

Nominally, I'm using Eclipse as my IDE.  Specifically the C/C++ 
Development Tools.  http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
CDT is a robust, mature project, but I haven't put a lot of time in the 
saddle with it to know exactly how good it is.  MinGW is supported, 
although several months ago, Eclipse would screw up MinGW if you had 
both MinGW and Cygwin on the same system.  I don't know about now. 


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