Re: No Guile on Windows? (was: My Guile Hacker Handbook)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dmitry Alexandrov 
> Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2020 03:06:53 +0300
> Cc: Guile User , Guix Help 
> 
> > ## Installation
> 
> > ### On Windows
> >
> > No solution yet.
> 
> Is that true?  Itʼs true (and a pity) that there no official packages, of 
> course, but ‘no solution’?
> 
> I vaguely recall, there was a Guile on MinGW a couple of years ago, does it 
> no longer build?  And what happened with Cygwin package after all?  
> cygwin.com says, that 3.0.4 is there [1].

  
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/guile-2.0.11-2-w32-bin.zip/download

Mind you, this is a 32-bit build, and it is configured without threads
(because building with threads produces Guile that crashes for almost
any non-trivial operation, you can find the details in the Guile
mailing list archives).

I never tried to build a newer Guile, as doing a fully-functional
MinGW port is a non-trivial endeavor that consumes a lot of time, and
I don't have that time now.


Sadly, Guile seems to care only about one OS: GNU/Linux, and more or
less disregard the rest.  Features are added that clearly cannot
easily work on other OSes, let alone non-Posix ones, and with each
such new feature producing a working MinGW port becomes harder and
harder, even for experienced hackers.

Please don't bother replying to this rant, it's just FYI, to convey my
personal recollections and experiences from doing the 2.0.x port, and
I don't intend to argue about it.

Re: No Guile on Windows? (was: My Guile Hacker Handbook)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:48:35 -0300
> From: David Pirotte 
> Cc: Dmitry Alexandrov , guile-u...@gnu.org, help-guix@gnu.org
> 
> fwiw, i've used msys2 (not so much anymore, but i still would if i had
> to ...), easy to install, update, well maintained, very friendly on irc
> when i needed to ask for help ...:
> 
>   https://www.msys2.org/
> 
> it has guile-2.2.7-1, threaded (which I've used. it works ...)

AFAIU, that's not a native Windows port, that's an MSYS2 port, which
is almost the same as a Cygwin build (MSYS2 is a fork of Cygwin).

IOW, you cannot link the MSYS2 libguile with a native MinGW program,
such as GDB or Gnu Make (or Lilypond, or any other application
mentioned in this thread).  Right?

Re: No Guile on Windows? (was: My Guile Hacker Handbook)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Christopher Lam 
> Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2020 13:56:28 +
> Cc: guile-user , help-guix@gnu.org
> 
> Gnucash 4.0 in windows is successfully using libguile-2.2-1.dll from MSYS2.

Is Gnucash a MinGW build or an MSYS2 build?  If the latter, it's
expected.