[gambit-list] The challenge of Scheme for Windows
Marc Feeley
feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Thu Dec 6 21:19:55 EST 2007
On 6-Dec-07, at 7:08 PM, Bob McIsaac wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I enjoy using Gambit on Linux but have no luck doing same on windows.
> I tried v401 with openwatcom. It failed because the platform-
> dependent
> header files need to be somehow configured.
I'll take a look at it.
> On v410 prebuilt, gsi works
> but there is an apparent linkage error with gsc. Perhaps there is
> some
> issue with my win32 environment.
The problem seems to be that your installation directory is
misconfigured. Can you try these commands in a MSYS shell:
% gsi -e '(pp (path-expand "~~"))'
% which gsi
Might there be a space or a special character in the path? Actually,
are you using the MinGW version or the Microsoft Visual Studio version?
> This is not to dis Gambit, Chicken Scheme presents the same sort of
> Windows headaches. It might be less challenging if Scheme for
> windows relied only on a single free win32 compiler such as
> Openwatcom.
Sure but which one!? I would think the gcc which comes with MinGW is
the most widely used free C compiler on Windows. Gcc is a good choice
also because the Gambit sources can take advantage of some of gcc's
extensions, such as computed gotos. In the past I had considered
bundling a C compiler with Gambit (such as LCC, TCC, and OpenWatcom),
but it is not simple to satisfy the licenses and it is non-trivial to
determine which files need to be distributed with the C compiler (e.g.
C preprocessor, header files, ...). Even if many users would be
content with a specific C compiler being installed along with Gambit,
there are other "power" users who want to be able to use the C
compiler that they use everyday for all their projects. In the end I
think it is best to allow the end user to choose the C compiler they
want. Note that the Gambit interpreter can still be used even if no C
compiler is available.
> Then there would not be the extra complexity of setting up Mingw or
> Cygwin.
Maybe you should talk to those folks and convince them to simplify
their installation procedure, for example by distributing an installer
for dummies (I always have a hard time installing MinGW because
several pieces have to be installed). Cygwin is a little better, but
it could be even simpler.
Marc
P.S. next time could you please submit your bug report on Gambit's bug
tracking system.
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