On 12/13/2011 09:21 AM, Martin DeMello wrote:
it's a bit frustrating for me because i don't have or
use windows either, but if i develop an end user app i really want it
to be as cross-platform as possible.
This attitude partially explains why support for OCaml under Windows
lacks behind: people want it to work, because they somehow have to
produce applications running under Windows, but they really don't like
this OS and certainly don't want to invest time in learning its gory
details in order to improve the situation with OCaml. I don't blame
anyone here, and I'd probably avoid developing under Windows myself if
this was not mandatory for our business. From what I hear, this is also
the case for other industrial users of OCaml who needs Windows support.
(And also for large projects like Coq, etc.)
There are a few talented OCaml enthusiasts who know quite a lot about
Windows and have put some energy in improving OCaml for this OS in the
past. Thanks to them!
As Xavier said, it would be great to find someone who'd like to join the
core dev team in order to improve support for Windows. Anyone interested?
But in order to get really good support in the long term, which includes
community tools (packaging, porting libraries, support for Windows API
and .Net, documentation, etc), I think we need to find a way to
"bootstrap" a larger community of OCaml hobbyists, who consider Windows
as their main platform. (It might be the case that "native Windows
users" are culturally less inclined to participate to an open source
project, but I don't believe this is the primary explanation for the
lack of community work for Windows. We simply need more people on board.)
Good support for OCaml under Windows would benefits not only to Windows
users, as it might simply attract a lot more people to OCaml and it
would probably make the life easier to those who are "forced" to produce
Windows applications. So this questions should be of interest to the
community as a whole.
Do you guys have ideas on how to bootstrap a larger community of
OCaml/Windows hobbyists?
Alain
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