Hi Mike, On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 9:49 PM Mike Gran <spk...@yahoo.com> wrote: > > Hello Guile, > > The Lisp Game Jam was a few weeks ago, and in prep, I took a stab an > making Guile work better on Windows, using MinGW MSys64 UCRT64 for > compilation. Little did I imagine that it would take a couple months > to make something servicable, so I never got around to actually making > a game. > > This Guile is a fork with a lot of hacks for Windows: lack of > POSIX shell, DLL nonsense, Windows filesystem instead of FHS, > yadda yadda yadda. The biggest hack is that of making > all the file paths relative to the guile executable, so that > it can be distributed as a single zip file or MSIX install file.
I haven't had a chance to try this out yet but I wanted to say that this is great work! I'd really like to have a good story to tell for shipping games built with Guile and Chickadee on Windows. In the past I've tried to cross-compile Guile for Windows from Linux and made it as far as getting Guile 3 to boot, but the JIT didn't work and I think threads, though enabled, were broken. I haven't used Windows for development in over 10 years so I'm somewhat helpless when things go wrong. It would be really great if we could organize a bit around upstreaming patches for proper Windows support and come up with some documentation with official recommendations for how to build for Windows. I never know what the best approach is: cygwin? mingw? native build (more work than the other two)? A lot of other Scheme implementations run on Windows, so Guile should, too. - Dave
