Windows release

[chenyan-dfinity]

How hard is it to build a Windows binary for moc?

Someone is asking on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dfinity/comments/mo9a16/hey_i_heard_dfinity_created_a_language_called/hcroi8y/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

[nomeata]

Related question at https://forum.dfinity.org/t/native-windows-support/1241/12

Hmm, did we do some research into this? I think we at least discussed it a bit, already two years ago (#580 (comment)).

I think it is relatively hard. For Haskell applications, I know how to cross-compile from nix (see dfinity/ic-hs#9 for example), but I don’t know of equivalent efforts for Ocaml.

Ah, here someone tried it before https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/nix-ocaml-cross-compilation-to-windows/5399. And looks like I investigated this in April. Without success.

May be easier to take moc.js and ship it with node :-)

[chenyan-dfinity]

Ah, there's also WSL. I think people can run Linux binary in WSL?

[rossberg]

Most of the OCaml toolchain works fine on Windows with Cygwin. Building Motoko could probably be made relatively easy, if we didn't depend on nix...

I don't know how easy it is to set up nix on WSL. Might be simple?

[nomeata]

We also need rust for the RTS. Of course we can use the same file as produced on Linux, but then you have a cross-system build, also not easy.

Maybe cygwin in nix is an option.

Or not using nix for this part, building in a GitHub action job on windows, fetching the RTS from the other jobs.

So there are many ways that are possibly possible, but none that are trivial.

If this were a normal open source project I'd say: let's wait until this is an itch strong enough for someone to scratch it and make a PR :-)