Win32 Extension Issues Wanted!

Everyone. I had a conversation with folks from Microsoft today about
trying to move Ruby's installer to Visual Studio 2005 and WiX (the MSI
installer). They're quite serious about trying to get us shifted to
modern compiler technology rather than VC++6 or even MSYS/MINGW. I
can't say that I disagree with them, either.

However, I indicated that one of the big problems that we had with
Ruby 1.8.2 was the use of VS.NET 2003 (VC++ 7.1) and its general
incompatibility -- focussing on errno, because that's the one item
which stuck in my mind -- with earlier and later runtimes, as well as
a big problem of compatibility with MSYS/gcc and any MSVCRT (isascii,
as reported by Ara Howard).

They asked for as much information as I can gather on this matter. If
you have had problems trying to get Ruby or an extension compiled or
running on Windows for any reason, but especially because of Microsoft
runtime DLL differences, please provide me as much information as
possible so that I can pass it on to the VS team at Microsoft.

For what it's worth, I have Ruby itself compiled with VS 2005,
although some of the extensions are not being built automatically,
from what I can tell. That may be a build script problem. However,
based on earlier reports of runtime version incompatibilities, it was
looking like I was going to have to recompile a *lot* of code. The
discussion today suggested that as long as function accesses are used
and not variable accesses, things will be okay (e.g., GetError() in
Windows, not errno). The problem, as I pointed out to them, is that
*most* Unix developers only ever have to worry about a single C
runtime being on their system and therefore don't need to worry about
errno being in a different runtime DLL. Ideally, they would be able to
give us an external way of getting at the errno from a specific
runtime that may not be "our" runtime (e.g., the runtime with which we
were linked).

What other problems have people had and what can you provide me as
evidence? Also, can I give them your name and email for direct
contact? I will be headed to Europe soon and won't be able to respond
quickly.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * [e-mail] * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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