Re: Windows port?

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 05/18, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> On 05/18, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> > On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 09:23:23AM -0500, Jason Bacon wrote:
> > > Note, however that the WSL has some limitations:
> > 
> > From my experience, it creates significantly less pain than Cygwin,
> > performs a lot better and doesn't need the majority of the source hacks
> > that mingw(64) does.
> 
> Would I be able to build native Windows binaries and libraries using
> pkgsrc under WSL?  (I have no experience with WSL.)  WSL would be a
> new pkgsrc platform, right?  Then pkgsrc would need support for a new
> compiler, right?  Would the bulk of the work be in adding compiler
> support for MinGW, Mingw-64, or Microsoft Visual Studio IDE?  Or is this
> whole thing still likely to be prohibitively difficult?

I read a little more about WSL in Windows Subsystem for Linux
Documentation [1], so now I think WSL would *not* be a new pkgsrc
platform.  I would install whatever Linux distribution in WSL that is
already supported by pkgsrc as a platform, and in theory nothing would
need to be done to bootstrap pkgsrc (or hopefully just minor changes).

Since the WSL documentation says you can "invoke Windows applications
from the Linux console," that sounds like it would be possible for
pkgsrc to invoke, for example, the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE command
line tools to compile for Windows if support for that compiler were
added (if it's not prohibitively difficult to do so).

Lewis

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/wsl/about