[erlang-questions] Status of Windows platform support in Erlang/OTP

[Amy Lear]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 2:31 AM, Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@REDACTED> wrote:
> IMO the preferred solution would be to do a pseudo-cross build in a
> Cygwin environment using a cygwin-to-{i686,x86_64}-w64-mingw32 cross
> compiler.  This gives you all the needed Unix:y build tools, but the
> resulting binaries don't need Cygwin.  That's how we build the Windows
> versions of our products.

My experience with porting some other projects to Windows suggests
cygwin is not actually needed if you're making native binaries instead
of linking against the cygwin compatibility layer; the mingw/msys
toolchain provides many (all?) of the typically necessary unix tools
and seems to be significantly faster for some builds. Technically the
msys portion is a fork of cygwin, but their branch seems to have less
overhead for many tasks somehow.


>  > What exactly is the status of HiPE on the Windows platform?
>
> Same as before, namely that it's not supported but it's probably possible
> to support it if you accept a 4KB per-native-thread memory consumption
> penalty.  FP exn handling must also be implemented, but I did a
> prototype of that some time ago.

I was afraid 'unsupported' would be the answer. I couldn't find any
indication anywhere whether HiPE was actually supposed to be at all
available for Windows; if the release notes or other supporting
documentation say I managed to miss it.

As far as potentially enabling it, for the workloads I would
personally consider a penalty of 4KB per native thread would almost
certainly be noise.


> Well, as I wrote recently in another thread on erlang-questions,
> there are no compiler or VM developers left in the HiPE team, we've
> all moved on to other jobs.

Oh right, I did see that during my research, but managed to forget
while reviewing my notes for my post. :/


> I run a small compiler/VM consultancy business on the side, and in
> that capacity I'd be willing to port HiPE to Windows and the mingw-w64
> toolchain, assuming a Cygwin build environment.  Fixes for the Windows
> IL32P64 model should ideally be done by the OTP group, but as they
> haven't done those already, and they a prerequisite for a 64-bit Erlang
> VM on Windows, I could do those as well.  Contact me offline to work out
> the details if you're interested.

I appreciate the offer, but I'm afraid for the near term my operating
budget is currently $0 plus whatever ephemeral value I might assign to
my time. :)

Thank you for your responses; mostly I just wanted to know where
things currently stood, since I couldn't find recent answers for these
questions.