From: Chet Ramey Subject: Re: feature proposal: expand associative arrays in lexicographic order of keys Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:16:46 -0400
>On 8/25/26 3:34 PM, Zachary Santer wrote: >> "make loadables" failed for me, this morning. I've attached the output >> if you're interested. Remember, I'm building bash in MSYS2 MSYS on a >> Windows box. I don't know that I can work with loadable builtins. (Mr. >> Marsh may not have realized that you have to build the loadable >> builtin yourself, actually.) >It doesn't look like the MSYS gcc can create shared objects, so loadable >builtins might not be available. That is interesting. Some time back, someone (on either help-bash or bug-bash) who was working on Windows with Cygwin stated that bash loadables don't work in Cygwin. That poster never explained how or why this was true, despite my efforts to get him to divulge details. Given that MSYS2 is more or less the same thing as Cygwin (Yeah, I know there will be blowback on this), this might explain it for both compiler suites. But here's the thing: I am told (*) that shared library extensions are now fully supported on Windows in GAWK. I bring this up because it is my understanding that the mechanism used in the two ecosystems (bash & GAWK) is basically the same and that the compiler suites used on Windows are basically the same, so, at least in theory, if it works in GAWK, it ought to work in bash. I don't know what compiler suite is used to build the officially endorsed version of GAWK for Windows, but it seems like whatever it is, it ought to be possible to use that to build bash and get shared libraries working. Incidentally, it used to be the case (long, long time ago) that the best compiler to use when compiling GAWK on Windows *was* Cygwin, simply because that was the most Unix-like compiler suite available on Windows. I think things have evolved since then, such that it is now possible to compile GAWK using more native Windows compilers. (*) Have not verified it myself - don't really have any Windows machines available to test it on. ================================================================================= Please do not send me replies to my posts on the list. I always read the replies via the web archive, so CC'ing to me is unnecessary. When responding to my posts, please try to refrain from giving bureaucratic answers. If you have nothing useful to say, then just click Next and go on. BTW, ain't interested in kludgey workarounds - got enough of my own! (YT id: 6H1lcubN0oE)
