Re: Compiling Chicken app for Windows from linux with Docker

[Vasilij Schneidermann]

Hello Théo,

> Using the cross development article on the wiki, digging through the build
> system a bit and fiddling a lot I created a MinGW-w64 based environment that
> let you build standalone apps from your chicken code and your favorite eggs
> that can be distributed as a single binary without needing dev oriented
> dependencies like cygwin or MSYS2.

That does sound interesting, though I'm not sure whether this won't be
an issue later on for foreign dependencies.

> Here is an image ready to go (because compiling chicken twice is pretty
> long): https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/lattay/chicken-mingw

That link redirects me to a login page.

> Currently my testing of this environment is pretty limited. I did a test
> with the args egg but I don't know how well it would perform with more
> complex eggs like bind based one.

I've done some manual testing in a MinGW64-msys2 environment and managed
to get most of my eggs to work. You can for example try to get the
breadline or taglib egg running as they only need readline/taglib
respectively.

> I don't have a non trivial app that would work on windows to test with this
> process.

I'd start with the trivial applications first. The gl-utils egg has some
examples that create graphical windows.

> Hence, I would be interested in some real world Windows ready app for this.

I have seen a few attempts at creating Windows-specific eggs, but so far
the only applications I've spotted were Kooda's games (which are
cross-compiled in a similar manner to your Docker setup). You can find
them here: <https://kooda.itch.io/>

My testing of egg installation under MinGW unveiled 94 errors, with
Cygwin being somewhat better off. I suspect the main problem is that
Scheme applications are CLI-only unless you somehow get GLFW3/SDL2/IUP
running and that is enough of a roadblock to deter all but the most
enthusiast users from spending more time with this Scheme system (and
instead use Racket's built-in cross-platform GUI or something else).

> Also, I have yet to understand what is the difference between console and
> GUI app in windows and how this environment could be used to build graphical
> apps.

Even a console application can make use of GLFW3 to launch a graphical
window to perform OpenGL drawing in, so the distinction is rather
technical: <https://stackoverflow.com/a/574918/8729149>

Vasilij

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