On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 12:09:18AM +0800, Qian Yun wrote:
> I was trying to make INSTALL.CYGWIN up to date.
>
> One serious problem occurs:
>
> The cygwin version of clisp contains a patch from March 2015
> that says "Don't allow saving executable memory images on Cygwin".
>
> Don't know why cygwin developer choose to apply this,
> but it effectively makes building FriCAS on Cygwin more
> difficult.
>
> The problem is, shall we still support Cygwin at all?
If we can.
> (Clearly, no one have built FriCAS successful on Cygwin
> with Clisp for the past 6 years.)
I would drop support for _clisp_ on Cygwin. IIRC during
initial Cygwin port clisp was the only free Lisp running on
Cygwin. And in practice the only free Lisp on Windows,
as theoreticaly one could use GCL, but in practice building
GCL dependend on exactly matching rather specific configuration
of obsolete software.
> Advantages:
>
> 1. Cygwin can have HyperDoc with X11.
Yes, that is important advantage.
Let me add another point:
1a. Cygwin may be prefered by Unix folks which have to use
Windows
I am not sure how important this is now, but I was in situations
that I was given computer to use. I could install software on
it but changing OS was out of question. Since computer run
Windows I installed Cygwin. Now everybody (including myself)
travels with a laptop, so main reason for using Windows is gone.
Still, I can imagine situations that people would prefer Linux
but for some reason have to use Windows.
> 2. Clisp is packaged by Cygwin. But this advantage is gone now.
People in the past had trouble building ECL on Cygwin, but it
seems that now ECL build reliably. Using ECL may require gcc
as dependency (so that user files can benefit from compilation).
Once we are past build problems and gcc dependency ECL
should be preferable to clisp.
> Disadvantages:
>
> 1. Clisp on Cygwin is slow, and not have a release for years.
> 2. Cygwin is not as portable as msys2/mingw64.
3. True Windows user hates Cygwin.
Still, as long as no Windows lover comes to give FriCAS on
Windows needed uplift Cygwin is our best option. I wrote
"Windows lover" because developers who are not immersed
into Windows culture are likely to miss many aspects
deemed important by Windows users.
> So, if we choose to support Cygwin, we may need to use ecl, ccl,
> or a unmodified clisp.
I have no idea if ccl (or sbcl???) runs with Cygwin. I somebody
manages to build using one of them, we could get better performance.
But realisticaly, it looks better to go for something that is
easy to build which now seem to be ECL.
--
Waldek Hebisch
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