[erlang-questions] Windows

[Loïc Hoguin]

Not out of the box, though. Or at least not for those that require a 
Makefile or shell script at some point. I haven't seen a single project 
include Visual Studio project files. Some have a .bat script instead, 
most don't.

If you try to compile you first end up with a compile error (or worse, I 
just tried with one that runs a Makefile and the win32 GNU make I have 
just threw up an exception ahah) and then you have to fix it yourself?

It's not a smooth experience and I really can't tell people that's what 
they should do. Either the experience is smooth, or it's not and you're 
better off telling people to install Linux.

On 05/20/2015 11:41 AM, Sergej Jurečko wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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 <mailto:erlang-questions@REDACTED>
>     http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
>

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
http://ninenines.eu