Roc on Windows Jun 2024 · beginners

For people who are not interested in becoming platform authors or contributors, but just want to try out roc for "end-applications", is trying it out on Windows for small cli apps etc. still discouraged?

It's something I could for example do at $(dayJob) for small-ish script type of applications where I'm not risking much by using roc, but everywhere I've looked it still seems to be discouraged.

Is it still the case that a breakthrough update of the compiler has to happen until you feel comfortable recommending people to try out roc on Windows?

Brendan Hansknecht (Jun 13 2024 at 14:06):

I'm not fully aware of the status here, but I think we still recommend wsl. @Luke Boswell should know best though.

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 20:26):

You are correct it's still not recommended unless your more comfortable diving into compiler bugs and compiling from source.

There has been a fair amount of work in the background making changes that will help get us to this point soon. For example we've been working on refactoring basic-cli so it will be much easier to build it for Windows.

Ideally we need a contributor who is also a Windows user to use roc and help find and fix the bugs. There's no major changes in the compiler though, its all there and %99 working fine.

I have tested roc-wasm4 and that works really well on Windows. All the zig platforms I've tested work fine using the legacy linker. There's a bug with the Windows surgical linker at the moment.

The main hurdle I think is upgrading our platforms and testing those so they support Windows. This isn't a change in the compiler though.

Gent Krasniqi (Jun 13 2024 at 21:26):

Could leveraging on something like MSYS2/mingw potentially mean that a Windows release could keep better pace with a Linux release?

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 21:50):

I dont think that's necessary. We have it in CI all native Windows and it's working well.

We don't include a release in nightly (I think) because it just hasnt been tested much and we know of some bugs. So if someone comes along they aren't likely to have a great experience unless they are comfortable with rust and building from source.

Richard Feldman (Jun 13 2024 at 22:47):

maybe we’re at the point where a nightly release would actually help surface bugs

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 22:53):

I just spent an hour or so hacking around with things manually on basic-cli, and we're much closer, but still not quite there to make a release that will "just work" using the legacy linker. It looks like it should just work, but we've got a few libs that aren't linked in by roc cli; and I'm struggling a little with Windows linking. libMSVCRT.a and libOLDNAMES.a.

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 22:55):

Also, I'm testing against this branch, which refactors the rust out into separate crates which is easier to follow

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 23:00):

zig build-exe .\examples\hello-world.obj .\platform\windows-x64.lib -lc
error: lld-link: could not open 'libMSVCRT.a': No such file or directory
error: lld-link: could not open 'libOLDNAMES.a': No such file or directory

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 23:01):

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 23:24):

PS C:\Users\bosyl\Documents\GitHub\basic-cli> C:\Users\bosyl\zig-windows-x86_64-0.13.0\zig-windows-x86_64-0.13.0\zig.exe build-exe .\examples\hello-world.obj .\platform\windows-x64.lib -lc
error: lld-link: could not open 'libMSVCRT.a': No such file or directory
error: lld-link: could not open 'libOLDNAMES.a': No such file or directory

Richard Feldman (Jun 13 2024 at 23:41):

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 23:43):

Luke Boswell (Jun 13 2024 at 23:53):

So if anyone, knows anyone, who knows how linking works on Windows and would like to look into this, that would be super. :smiley:

Gent Krasniqi (Jun 15 2024 at 18:45):

I don't know much about zig, but doesn't the ".a" extension suggest it is actually expecting something like mingw to be installed? It would be ".lib" if it were native, right?

Luke Boswell (Jun 15 2024 at 23:06):

That does seem strange. I've searched through the roc codebase and can't find any reference to these libs. Also the linking for windows just deferes to zig like so;

let child = zig()
    .args(["build-exe"])
    .args(input_paths)
    .args([
        "-target",
        "native",
        "--subsystem",
        "console",
        "-lc",
        &format!("-femit-bin={}", output_path.to_str().unwrap()),
    ])
    .spawn()?;

Gent Krasniqi (Jun 16 2024 at 12:41):

I'm trying to build from source by following BUILDING_FROM_SOURCE.md, and ran into this when doing cargo run examples/platform-switching/rocLovesRust.roc:

Failed to rebuild src/lib.rs:
        The executed command was:
            rustup run nightly-2023-12-21 cargo build --lib
        stderr of that command:
            error: toolchain 'nightly-2023-12-21-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc' is not installed

Gent Krasniqi (Jun 16 2024 at 12:43):

I will install that with rustup, but just wanted to point that out. Is there any other checklist for building from source that I'm maybe missing?

Luke Boswell (Jun 16 2024 at 20:04):

Luke Boswell (Jun 16 2024 at 21:53):

Gent Krasniqi (Jun 17 2024 at 08:05):

Yes it turned out the guide was actually sufficient for building roc, I guess only building some of the example platforms had different requirements. Anyway I think I'm done playing with it in Windows for now considering neither of basic-cli or basic-webserver work. :big_smile:

Gent Krasniqi (Jun 17 2024 at 08:07):

In case it's of interest, and not simply an outdated example, I could report a runtime error I got with the rocLovesZig.roc example. (it compiled without errors)
But I have that on another laptop that I don't have access to right now.

Stream: beginners

Topic: Roc on Windows Jun 2024

Gent Krasniqi (Jun 13 2024 at 12:03):