BEAM on Win32?

[Mattias Nilsson]

Craig Dickson wrote:
> 
> 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).

BEAM on Win32 is almost a reality today, but has not been thouroughly
tested yet. We are in the process
of distributing a win32 BEAM very soon. 

If you want to compile BEAM on Win32, you will most definetly need to
compile it with a mixture of VC and GCC, due to a few 'missing' features
in VC that GCC has (jump-tables etc). 

I cannot give you more info right now, as I don't have all the details
myself. Anyway, it's most definetly
possible to compile BEAM on Windows if you're prepared to dig a bit..

-- 
Best Regards, Mattias Nilsson
Open Telecom Platform, Open Systems, Ericsson