[erlang-questions] Windows Support

[Dave Cottlehuber]

Hi,

At the n-1 erlang factory, there were a few slides posted about
building Erlang for 64-bit windows, and VS2010 support. I couldn't
attend but I'd like to know more.

Does anybody have any more details about this? Is there something I
can contribute to?

On a related note, using cygwin to run Make etc is both terribly
painful and slow on windows - over a day on my old PC, now only about
3 hours each time. Is there any intent to move to anything else such
as cmake, or msbuild? Would a windows-specific patch for this, for
erlang, be considered or not?

There are two reasons this is important to me, as a packager of
CouchDB on Windows.

- the wrapper scripts only support a small subset of what GNU
autotools expects. Downstream projects struggle with working around
this consistently so we end up hacking autotools just to support
compilation of very simple NIFs in C++ and C.

- as a package maintainer, it is very difficult to provide
straightforward steps for compiling NIFs without ending up forcing
people to download & build the whole erlang tree from source. I'd love
to simply tell people "install SDK 7.0, cmake, and then build Product
X", rather than spend a day getting the toolchain set up and working.

- I'm finding similar issues while working with rebar. This could be
my bad of course!

Finally, if there are people who have a solution for these issues in
the current erlang, please let me know!

Thanks
Dave