[M3devel] platform/build_dir is a big tuple?

[Mika Nystrom]

Henning Thielemann writes:
>
>On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Randy Coleburn wrote:
>
>> Jay:
>>
>> For my part on Windows, I am happy to stay with the underlying OS, the
>> native windows threading, the integrated backend, and use the free
>> Microsoft Visual Studio tools.  I don't really want to have to
>> install/use cygwin or any of the other variants.  When I see target =
>> NT386, this list is what I am expecting.  For the cm3 newbie coming from
>> a Microsoft Windows environment, I think this list would be the most
>> appealing and pose the least barrier to getting starting.  Yes, I still
>> will work on the installer program once I'm satisfied that I have a good
>> working cm3 on Windows.
>
>One year ago I was in the situation to port one of my Modula-3 programs
>from Linux to Windows in order to hand it over to a Windows user. As I
>never use Windows, I have only a plain Windows installation on my machine
>with almost no tools other than cm3. I was glad to be able to run cm3
>immediately and to find all libraries that I needed in binary form without
>Cygwin dependencies - otherwise not only I had to install that on my
>machine but I also would have to persuade the other Windows guy to install
>it as well. Summarized I strongly vote for NT386 being Windows with least
>dependencies on other packages.

My experience was almost the opposite.  I had a complicated system
running on Unix, using Modula-3 for most of its implementation but
all sorts of other dirty glue to run properly, and various calls
to libc routines.  A couple of Windows people told me "please run
this stuff on our machine [we don't care how you do it]".  I promptly
installed Cygwin and got the whole thing running with a fairly small
amount of fuss.  Accordingly, I vote for NT386GNU being a Cygwin
thing that looks as much like Unix as possible!

I can certainly see the other point of view, but is there a great
need for something between these two extremes?  If I were the one
putting together Modula-3 compilers for Windows, I'd do those two
(not sure which one first) and not worry about all the other
permutations of threading libraries, compilers, etc.

     Mika