Building on Windows

Little Language
8

So I was able to build without any of our internal crud. Here’s what I did:

  1. Install a fresh mingw/msys environment from http://www.mingw.org using the instructions found here
  2. The initial installation doesn’t include a bunch of development things so I added the things I thought I’d need (give me a simple command to generate a list and I’m more than happy to share, I just drove the gui install and didn’t really take notes about what I selected)
  3. Open an msys window for this installation (by running c:\MinGW\msys\1.0\msys.bat)
  4. Installed git for windows from https://git-for-windows.github.io
  5. Using that git (its bash window), cloned the little-lang repo from github
  6. In the msys window created in step 3, cd to the git repo and typed make
  7. Fix the build failure in tcl/generic/tclIOSock.c by removing the ifdef __MINGW32__ block at the bottom (that’s to workaround some missing definitions in the crusty old mingw that we’ve been using internally).
  8. Type make again and it just worked.

I then tried to install msys2 from http://msys2.github.io and repeat the above. The build fails because the Makefile tries to run our platform script which outputs unix, win, macosx based on the output of uname -a. Unfortunately, msys2 reports MSYS... instead of MINGW... so that fails. Fixing platform moves us onto running configure which fails spectacularly because config.guess does not grok MSYS vs MINGW as a platform name. Perhaps this is the big undertaking that you were trying to avoid? I certainly am :smiley:

So my question back to you all is: Is there a de facto standard build environment on Windows?

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