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

[Semih Cemiloglu]

Hi Felix,

I take this as you didn't refuse MSVC in principle. It was build/link problems 
which caused the situation.
Hopefully, once my knowledge about Chicken's internals increase, I will do 
something about it.

As far as I know, there is no Scheme system that can interact with MS' .NET 
platform except this one:
http://ironscheme.codeplex.com/
Maybe Chicken will extend its reach to this realm.

Can "Makefile.msvc" from 3.4.0 be used as a starting point for 4.5.X?

Regards
Semih

-----Original Message-----
From: Felix [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Monday, 9 August 2010 1:38 PM
To: Semih Cemiloglu
Cc: address@hidden; address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] Support for Microsoft Visual C++ compiler

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