Re: [Chicken-users] Support for Microsoft Visual C++ compiler

[Felix]

From: Leonardo Valeri Manera <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] Support for Microsoft Visual C++ compiler
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2010 04:01:27 +0200

> On 9 August 2010 03:50, Semih Cemiloglu <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Dear Chicken maintainers,
>>
>> I can see from following thread that MSVC support has been dropped a while 
>> ago:
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg00941.html
>>
>> It's not clear to me whether this was due to fact that resultant chicken had 
>> too many defects, or you did not want to maintain yet another platform. 
>> Would you please shed some light on this issue?
> 
> Neither - there was nobody willing to maintain the MSVC makefiles, and
> eventually Felix got sick of bugs with them, IIRC.

That's basically the problem: supporting the MSVC tools is quite an
ordeal, if you want to provide a command-line based build. The
Microsoft compiler is actually not that bad, but getting the linking
options right is tricky. The MSVC-specific places in the
Scheme-compiler and the libraries have been and will be kept, and it
should be possible to adapt the mingw-build, which means users would
have to get hold of a mingw "make" (since nmake is just painful).

IMHO, the right thing would be to create a proper MSVC .sln and 
project files for all the tools, and (most importantly) have someone
who is willing to maintain these. 


cheers,
felix