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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

I don't yet use Crystal, but it's kind of painful that Windows support is in the "What can wait? - after 1.0" section. Cross-platform support is one of the reasons I've been diving into Rust.

However "we integrated a CI for Windows to ensure we continue moving steadily forward" sounds like a good compromise for limited resources.

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Yeah, especially as the idea that adding windows support won't end up affecting public APIs is pretty naive. Windows and unix-like systems have very different APIs for lot's of things, and it's very easy to fall into designing something unix-specific if you don't make it cross-platform from the start.

Crystal mostly copies ruby, so it's probably not that naive (though actually I don't know how ruby is on windows).

Ruby has a pretty solid Api story on windows (meaning code and gems generally work) - but it's not quite a tier one platform - it's gotten better, but eg automatic compilation of c level extensions isn't quite as good as on Linux. This mostly stems from using msys and not vc++ - and is similar to the issues python used to face on windows. But if I'm not mistaken python moved to vc a while after community edition became a thing.

We're also running some rather old code (w old versions of ruby) - and that's obviously not great - but also somewhat worse on windows than on Linux.

All that might make it sounds like ruby on windows is tricky - but it really has gotten quite great, especially after 2.4.

I wonder if this problem won’t go away after WSL2.0?

How far away are we from a Windows that can run Unix/POSIX out of the box?

If anything WSL2.0 has made it clearer than WSL is a development environment, not a universal compatibility layer.

WSL is an effort to bring into Windows the crowd that buys macbooks to develop GNU/Linux software, as they are unwilling to support Linux OEMs.

The Windows developer community at large, just like Apple developers, isn't that much into UNIX compatibility layers.

I find it a little sad that windows support is considered essential (and its lack is a dealbreaker), but linux support is not, even though developers predominantly use macos and linux.

If you compare to ruby, there are a couple of quite nice packages for os automation that allows for scripting setup of services etc. That's a space where os level support is essential.

That said, crystal being new, and wsl 1/2 being a thing... I'm à little surprised for the demand for a windows version.

OTOH being able to create a gui rad ide like Lazarus or Delphi, that is cross-platform, compiles to native executables and uses crystal in place of Pascal would probably be great.

What makes you say linux support is not essential?

Why do you believe more devs are on mac than windows? What country are you in?

It's the same mistake so many Ruby projects made 15 years ago. Python, on the other hand, was aggressively cross-platform.

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