Port Nix to Windows, Natively or MinGW+MSYS2

[be5invis]

Possible combinations:

• Native. No dependency. This may be very hard for *nix developers since they do not have any knowledge about how to do native Win32 development (like: avoid using char*).
• MinGW/MSYS2. Since nix may depend on many Unix external libraries. However the APIs implemented in MinGW may have artifacts on Windows (i.e. Unicode support).
• Midipix. It is under early development but its’ library design is better.

[edolstra]

Closing as too vague. This issue asks for a bunch of things, so it's unclear when it could be closed. Also, Nix (AFAIK) already builds on Cygwin.

There already is #1320 for MinGW support.

[puffnfresh]

It also works on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (aka Bash on Ubuntu on Windows)

[voronoipotato]

Part of NPM's success is that it worked in windows, mac, and linux without any special configuration. Yes WSL and Cygwin should be considered special configuration. Food for thought.

[sbourdeauducq]

If there is funding for this, would there be people willing to take on that job?

Things that I particularly want to get working are:

• No WSL, Cygwin or anything that the user has to install themselves or is buggy (Cygwin I'm looking at you). Midipix or MSYS may be OK if they are reliable and transparent.
• Python and some rather usual packages
• LLVM
• Qt in native mode - none of this X server stuff that doesn't work - and PyQt/PySide
• Yosys, Nextpnr, OpenOCD
• Some GUI installer for newbies that sets up a pre-defined functional environment that more advanced users can tweak later.

[puffnfresh]

Why is MSYS acceptable but not WSL?

[sbourdeauducq]

AFAIK MSYS applications are simply linked against some special libraries, and then from a user perspective behave as regular Windows applications (but I might be wrong).
WSL requires significant user intervention to set up; also WSL has no GDI access so native Qt isn't going to work. We'd be stuck with a slow, painful to set up, and dysfunctional X server.

[puffnfresh]

Have you tried to compile Nix using MSYS or similar? I'm skeptical Nix won't need a significant rewrite to achieve that but I hope to be wrong.