[swift-evolution] #if os(Windows) and MSVC/Cygwin Compatibility

[John McCall]

> On May 3, 2016, at 9:22 AM, Michael Buckley via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> I may be fundamentally misunderstanding the Windows Subsystem for Linux, but I believe it just provides binary compatibility for Linux x86_64 command-line tools, but doesn't quite implement enough of the Linux syscalls to run a Linux window manager in order to run GUI programs. So it's certainly something you could compile your server code for if you wanted to host on a Windows server, but it's not something you could use to distribute client software.

I want to stop this thread of the conversation here.  This is not a general technology discussion forum; it's not our place to second-guess whether Cygwin is useful.  The Swift project's primary criterion for accepting a port is whether there are contributors willing to maintain it.  That's not the only criterion — I could certainly imagine ports that would be too burdensome on the compiler to be worth trying to support, like a platform with a 12-bit byte — but I have seen no argument that the Cygwin port comes close to crossing that line.

John.