[EXT] Guile 64-bit Windows support, redux

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

Hi Mike,

On Tue, Jun 6, 2023 at 4:51 PM Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Guile,
>
> There have been a few times where I made Guile work on
> MinGW -- usually the 32-bit, unthreaded variety -- because I wanted it
> for my own entertainment.  Often around the time of the Lisp Game Jam.
> The Game Jam just happened, so I was poking it again.  Although
> I never actually delivered my game this year.

Game jam time is also when I lament the lack of real Windows support.
I'm very interested in being able to provide Windows releases of games
built with guile-sdl2 and/or chickadee. The Common Lisp and Fennel
folks have no problem shipping things for Windows users.

> Janneke has also poked at Windows support a few times as well, and
> he actually got it to run on 64-bit Windows.

Did JIT work? When I tried this years ago it didn't. Would be a major
victory if it works now.

> I'd be willing [1] to update the patches for MinGW support for
> review and inclusion into the main branch
> for 3.0.10 or 3.2 but, only if maintainers are open, in principle,
> to committing the most disruptive patch: the one where all
> long integers become intptr_t to deal with Window's stupid
> 4-byte longs on 64-bit OSs.  Without agreeing on that as a
> possibility, 64-bit Windows support is DOA.
>
> There are a couple of slightly outdated versions of janekke's 64-bit patch.
> Here, for example:
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/commit/?h=wip-mingw&id=76950b4281c7dfff78b9ead6d3d62c070bbc1f13
>
> Lately, with GitHub providing decent zero-cost Windows images
> for their CI/CD actions, it should be possible to do a nightly pull
> and 'make distcheck' off the main branch for Windows, Ubuntu,
> and MacOS, without requiring the developer to use non-free tools
> directly.  (But lots of non-free Javascript and who-knows-what on
> GitHub's side of things.)

I'm obviously not a maintainer but I do want to be vocal in my support
for a good Windows story.  Despite how much I personally do not want
to use Windows, I do want users who do to be able to run my software.

> If this could be set up, it might stop the Windows build from getting
> stale so quickly.
>
> Also, it might be that this isn't worth doing.  After all, you can run
> Guile on Cygwin and Guix on WSL on Windows 10/11 already.
> But some projects that depend on Guile do deliver on
> Windows using customized versions of 2.2 or 1.8.

WSL is cool and all, but personally I want to ship native Windows
stuff that "just works" as much as possible.  I'm not sure what the
graphics story is like on WSL these days, but in the past dealing with
X11 compatibility and GPUs was not easy, or so I've heard. So for me,
I'd really like to see the MinGW build work acceptably (threads, JIT,
etc.)  Building with MSVC would be even better but I'll take what I
can get. :) I just get jealous whenever I look at some new language
implementation (or just some other Scheme) and see that it can do
native Windows, Linux, and MacOS builds.

- Dave