CHICKEN 6 and win32 support

(sorry, the previous mail got lost on the way out...)

Hi!

I'm currently trying to get CHICKEN 6 into a workable state on win32
(native) and am running out of steam. I think I have most win32
wide-char API calls covered for UNICODE support, but still have
problems with subprocess invocations, specifically in chicken-install
and csc. I also get a non-deterministic error (it seems) when running
the test suite (status 116, not sure what this means, anyone?).

Now this takes a lot of time, since I'm not comfortable with Windows
as the platform is not one I use or enjoy working with. Someone with a
bit more experience with Windows development and with a well-oiled dev
environment could probably figure this out relatively easily. So I
call for someone who may be willing to give us a hand in debugging
win32 issues and who perhaps might be interested in regularly testing
the current CHICKEN development version on win32 native, using mingw
(the w64devkit flavor).

It would be great, no, AWESOME, if we could get assistance. You don't
need to be a CHICKEN guru - some experience with C, Scheme, CHICKEN
and Windows would be fine. I will most certainly be available for any
questions that you might have.

Note that Cygwin and WSL should work fine. But pure win32 support
still is nice for UI, games and other areas that need deep integration
with Windows. I don't feel like I can go on on myself, I just can't
work on Windows without getting frustrated, and we all should do the
things we enjoy at least a bit, this is an open source project, after
all. It would be a pity to chuck the whole native win32 stuff, but
a half-done, half working implementation is worse than none at all
as it confuses users, and takes away limited development resources
that we have for the core system.


cheers,
felix