Re: Windoze NT, Visual C and guile

[Tel <telford@eng.uts.edu.au>]

> Is there a port of guile to the Visual C++ enviroment?  I know it's a sad
> question, but unfortunately I have to use Visual C++ and not some other
> compiler.  It's an employment thing...  

I've got it going under DJGPP and egcs-wingwin32 (both related to gcc)
under Microsoft Win95 and Win-NT. You have to rip out quite a bit including
POSIX support and signals (though DJGPP is quite good at on emulating unix
signals), also the ./configure script breaks pretty severely (most notably
because it makes heavy use of test -e to search for compiler binaries,
these all have .EXE on them under Microsoft so ./configure tries to tell you
that you have no compiler -- the DJGPP folks beat this by editing ./configure
and using test -x, there might also be ported versions of autoconf that
understand this). Possibly the cygnus cygwin32-gcc might be an easier target
but then you suffer the problem of DLL files needing to be dragged along
with whatever you produce.

The other painful thing is libtool which uses really long command lines
that break the crappy shell parsing of win32 (a major problem with the
mingwin32 library, DJGPP quietly replaces DOS command line handling with its
own), you may need to ensure that some of the shell scripts have CRLF
termination because plain LF termination also breaks win32.

I have purchased a recent version of MS-Visual C++ but all the help is
linked through internet explorer 4 and stored in these strangely archived
HTML files (if I could convert to normal HTML I'd just use lynx and feel
happy but I can't find anything that will extract them from the archives
-- if anyone knows how to fix this I'd appreciate some tips),
it all started to get on my nerves so I put off trying to keep the MS
version of my software up to date (I'll do it eventually, promise ;-).

If you want the source that I have hacked about then mail me and I'll
archive it up for you -- it is a mess and you can't even do a make clean
on it because so much has been tweaked when it failed to build normally.
It is a snapshot that is about six months old and the only thing
positive to be said is that it does compile. I doubt that it would work
as is with MS-Visual C++.

Also, you might find MS Foundation Classes difficult because you can't
capture main() which guile requires. The win32 API is probably the only
usable option.

Good luck with your employment thing...

	- Tel

PS: if you get it working then tell me!