Why many packages don't support Windows? It's par for the course in open-source development, unfortunately. I gave a talk on this at JuliaCon in June where I discussed some of the challenges in making things work on Windows and how to go about fixing them, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbG-rqDCNqs - if you find packages you use that aren't currently testing on Windows but could be, I encourage you to submit pull requests adding appveyor.yml files and suggesting the authors enable Windows CI testing.
Julia makes it easy to wrap C and Fortran libraries so people do exactly that quite often, but building most of those C and Fortran libraries on Windows is nontrivial. Witness Anaconda, which exists to make binary installation of libraries in the Python ecosystem possible so you don't need a compiler on the user's machine at install time. In Julia we tend to focus on individual platform-specific tools, like WinRPM.jl for a large number of packages on Windows and Homebrew.jl on Mac. On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 3:56:44 PM UTC-7, Joel wrote: > > Thanks for the information; food for thought. > > Out of curiosity, do you know why this is the case, by the way? > > Den fredag 16 oktober 2015 kl. 21:00:12 UTC+1 skrev Tony Kelman: >> >> Quite a few Julia packages are written in a way that assumes you're on >> Linux or Mac with build tools installed. Not all, and we're gradually >> fixing cases where packages can be made more portable. Best thing to do for >> now would be to submit a pull request adding a note to the readme that the >> package does not currently work on Windows, to save future users a bit of >> confusion. > >
