Re: [Chicken-users] MSVC makefile (was Errors building eggs in mingw/msys)

[Ashley]

John Cowan wrote:
> All builds on Windows (cygwin, mingw, mingw/msys) have the same issue:
> Windows doesn't have a separate search path for DLLs, so all DLLs have
> to be on $PATH.  However, the working directory is *always* on $PATH
> whether explicitly so or not.
>   
Actually, the problem turned out to be my misunderstanding of the intent
of the mingw-msys makefile.  I assumed it was similar to the cygwin build,
but I realize now that doesn't make much sense as mingw uses the microsoft
runtime.  So things like chicken-setup, which ultimately call system(), need
paths windows can understand.  I was using it as if /home referenced
the root of the file system, when in fact it sits at c:\msys\1.0\home.

Anyway, the main reason I was playing with this was to get familiar with
the build system so I could develop a makefile for the visual C compiler.
I use chicken at work and I must have MSVC support.  The old version I've
been using for a couple of years supports it, but I'd like to upgrade to 
a newer
version.

I've got my new makefile (Makefile.msvc) working for all targets in 
chicken-3.0.0,
and I've modified chicken-setup.scm and csc.scm to handle the MSVC 
compiler.  Most
of the eggs I've tried build successfully, though a couple seem to have 
some minor unix
assumptions that cause problems.  The easyffi egg won't build, at least 
with MSVC 2003,
because it contains a literal string larger than 65535 characters.  I 
assume that's a heap
though I haven't looked at it.  Maybe the newer MS compilers won't have 
that stupid
limitation, or maybe I can pass some flag to chicken to deal with it.

I'm going to do some more work on it today.  Right now uninstall doesn't 
work and it
doesn't clean up properly in the main build or when using 
chicken-setup.  Assuming
people are interested, I'll post a patch later today.

ashley