Hi Cygnalers,
The TXR Language project used to provide binary releases for Windows in two ways: a MinGW port, and a Cygwin port.
Thanks to Cygnal, MinGW is now dropped. The executable installer version of TXR simply packages up the Cygwin binary and Cygnal. The txr.exe and txr-win.exe executables are exactly the same files in both packages. (The txr-win.exe is a build of TXR that runs with no console window).
TXR shows that Cygnal is viable; it shows how a program that is already ported to Cygwin can be "nativized" without too many difficulties and shipped out the door.
TXR finds its installation files relative to its own installation location (on all platforms). It does not depend on looking in a fixed, absolute location like /usr/share/txr. Thus the TXR executable has to do almost nothing differently on Cygnal; the logic for finding installed materials Just Works.
The TXR Lisp interactive listener works beautifully, straight out of cmd.exe. Yet, internally, it's just using POSIX termios to put the TTY into raw mode and issuing and parsing VT100 terminal control escape sequences.
When you interrupt a lengthy computation in the TXR listener with Ctrl-C, this is delivered as a SIGINT signal. It's the same code that is used on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and other platforms.
None of this worked under MinGW, for obvious reasons: it required a laborious port to Win32. Since I introduced the listener almost a year ago, it pained me not having it working in the Windows version.
Cheers ...
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