[erlang-questions] Windows

[Sergej Jurečko]

If you have git installed on windows, it comes with a bash shell. Git
works, rebar works, C drivers work with visual studio, which those "fake"
developers are probably using anyway.


Sergej

On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Yesterday the topic of Windows development was brought up on Twitter. I
> looked into it and it's clearly an issue. At best you can compile projects
> that don't involve shell scripts, makefiles or C code, so you can't really
> work on anything significant as a large number of open source projects
> involve one or the other (yes, even when using rebar).
>
> Now there's three ways Erlang could be more friendly to Windows developers:
>
> To use Windows tools imply making open source projects work for Windows.
> Sure perhaps it's not an issue for the simplest NIFs but some projects
> require C libraries which themselves aren't always easy to make work on
> Windows.
>
> MingW has the same issues. You need to fix everything to work on Windows.
>
> Cygwin makes this much easier. Everything seems to work... except Erlang.
> Erlang on Cygwin thinks it runs on win32 and, while true to a certain
> extent, it fails badly when dealing with files (cygwin has / as root while
> win32 has c:\).
>
> Now you might say Cygwin is massive. That's true, it takes some time to
> install and some space on the disk. But it's very easy to install and can
> be almost entirely automated using chocolatey and apt-cyg. And adding an
> SSH server on top of that is a couple commands away, so it is a very
> interesting solution if you ask me.
>
> Now Erlang compiles on Cygwin... but produces the win32 target. Which
> brings me to the main subject of this email: what would it involve to make
> Erlang work on Cygwin? Considering Cygwin is a mix of Windows and Linux
> it's probably just about enabling one or another piece of code, or is it?
>
> It could be a fine side project but I don't really know where to start.
> Any tips appreciated.
>
> PS: tried just patching os:type()... that didn't work. Ended up with
> Erlang not finding a file that existed on disk when running common_test.
>
> PPS: I know "real" developers use Unix. But the more numerous "fake"
> developers might be more interested in Erlang if they can keep their OS.
>
> PPPS: I know this isn't a good option if you're going to create
> Photoshoperl, but it's still a good option for server application
> development.
>
> --
> Loïc Hoguin
> http://ninenines.eu
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20150520/eddb55d0/attachment.htm>