Serious Win32 ambitions

[stefan]

Dear Guile'rs,

  Thanks for accapting M$-Windows patches.  The current state of the
native Win32 port (both MinGW gcc and M$VC) can be described as follows:
  With proper installation of Cygwin toolchain (bash, grep, etc.) and the
MinGW compiler collection you can compile the unstable CVS Guile out of
the box as shared and static target with most of the features enabled.

 * Limited POSIX functionality.
 * Networking API.
 * Guile debugger.
 * Regex API.
 * Crypt interface.
 * Dynamic linker.
 * Readline support.
 * Support for srfi-13-14 and srfi-4.
 * QuickThreads support (cooperative threads).

  The "check-guile" script runs through without errors except for a single
test file which is "ports.test".  Here we are using fork() within the
(open-pipe) thingy.  Also we do not have an appropiate fcntl()
replacement.
  I would like to know if it is of any use to continue here.  Personally I
wish to contribute more on this issue.  Here my proposals for the
near future; please let me know if this is any good for...

 * `fcntl()' replacement.
 * `win32-socket.'c which holds Winsock-API error codes and implements
   missing BSD-style functions.
 * Write a C-level (open-pipe) which performs a fork() for Unices and
   implements kind of work-around in M$-Windows.  (It is possible to
   redirect stdin/stdout through a pair of pipes on Win32.)

Thanks in advance,
        address@hidden