BEAM on Win32?

[Craig Dickson]

I've just installed the pre-built 47.4.1 Win32 binaries and I find that it
seems to be a JAM-only build. This is a little disappointing to me as I was
hoping to try out the faster BEAM emulator. I guess I will have to build my
own from sources. There are some comments on how to do this in the README,
but they seem to be Unix-centric -- no comments on how to do the same with
the Win32 makefiles. I'm hoping that if I simply compile BEAM.EXE with MS
VC++ 5.0, drop it into my current 47.4.1 JAM installation, and compile all
the libraries for BEAM (while running under JAM, presumably, since I don't
expect the BEAM emulator to be very useful until libraries have been built
for it), and alter the "Emulator" key in the registry to say "beam" instead
of "jam", that everything will work. Is it that simple?

Why is it that BEAM.EXE was not included in the Win32 build? Is it still
considered experimental? If it is still not as stable as JAM then I may
stick with JAM for the time being (though it would still be interesting to
compare performance between the two).

Thanks,

Craig