Please provide Windows binaries

[StoneCypher]

There's a whole lot of Windows developers out there who would love to use this too, and who will contribute based on it.

[Deathspike]

+1

[jozn]

+1

[Silverwolf90]

+1

[davidgilbertson]

+1 (58)

[Hoejsgaard]

+1

[m1sta]

Could the OCaml components be built with OcpWin and then bound into a node module perhaps?

[StoneCypher]

Yes, but until it's done by the official team, sindresorhus isn't going to bind it up into the main node module, so we'd still be locked out of the main path.

We just have to wait until the team thinks that having 92% of the programmers on Earth is important. And since they're Mac people, that'll probably be a while :cry:

[bakesteve]

Any ideas on if nuclide will support this? Or is that going to be based on a cross platform system (atom, and electron) but not reeaaly cross platform..

[StoneCypher]

You'd be a lot better off asking the Nuclide people that

[bakesteve]

Ha. Good point!

[m1sta]

@StoneCypher Maybe we could convince @lefessan to put together a more generic node module that allows use of OCaml and Node.js together (similar in concept to node-julia)? This is one of many times when I can see OCaml and Javascript as potential bedmates. Probably a discussion for elsewhere though really.

[lucynuri22]

On Apr 23, 2015 9:55 AM, "m1sta" notifications@github.com wrote:

Could the OCaml components be built with OcpWin and then bound into a node module perhaps?

H>

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[mysticatea]

+1

[SimonMeskens]

I managed to compile Flow on Windows. It doesn't seem to work quite yet, but should be close. Here's what I did:

• Install Cygwin with GCC and the OCaml packages and libelf (you might need some others, like m4 or maybe libbsd)
• make dummies for fsnotify.ml and fsnotify.mli
• run make

Compilation runs fine, the flow executable runs, but doesn't do many useful things. Running flow.exe repeatedly fails to run the server, running flow check gives a cryptic error: "Error initializing: Resource temporarily unavailable"

[alexander-entin]

+1

[delaneyj]

+1

[stanshillis]

+1

[LMLB]

+1

[m1sta]

Windows users who want to play with flow can try https://github.com/unknownexception/tryflow (aka http://tryflow.org/)

[StoneCypher]

@m1sta unfortunately we still cannot use it as part of our build systems.

[bakesteve]

Ditto Though the js_of_ocaml approach could be promising I guess as we’re already running abunch of node in our pipeline

[astoilkov]

+72

This discussion is from November 2014. Is there any progress? Are there any plans and schedule when we will be able to run flow on Windows. Really excited about flow and waiting to get my hands on it.

[zpdDG4gta8XKpMCd]

+73

[motiz88]

While we all wait... :) I have been happily running the latest Flow (0.11.0) for a few hours, with this Docker image I put together, on Windows.

The image has Flow preinstalled and in the PATH, so I just mount my source code at /app on a fresh container and start a Bash session inside it, where flow init, flow start, flow check etc work normally.

If you'd rather not keep a dedicated Bash window open, it should also be possible to, say, run the container in the background and docker exec <container_id> flow into it as needed.

Docker image specific discussion welcome at https://github.com/motiz88/flow-docker.

[lejafo]

+1 (75 I think)

[RinatMullayanov]

+1 (76th) very need.

[dead-claudia]

Actually, we're at 66 of them (I counted them with help from Chrome's find feature). And I don't think any more "+1"s are going to get it fixed quicker, since it's only adding noise at this point. Subscribing to the bug is a much better way to show you want this feature, as it will reduce noise, which will help us know when an important update regarding this feature request happens.

So, could we please not reply with simple responses such as "+1" and "Me, too", and prefer more meaningful ones when appropriate?

Also, if you have a PR to even start this, please, by all means, submit it.

[PixnBits]

"Do not go gentle into that good night" Building platform-specific binaries is so <timeperiod>.

Half of me agrees with you on the noise bit. The other half points out that effort is put where interest is raised.

[StoneCypher]

@impinball - please finish reading the thread, where the PR has already been started. We will continue counting, because that actually does have an impact.

[josephwoodward]

Heard about this on JavaScript Jabber podcast and was excited to try it. Gutted there's no Windows support so I can't use it :(

+1 from me for sure!

[burmisov]

Would like it too.

My another crazy idea was to make Flow watch a remote directory, then we could setup either a separate centralized linux-based "Flow server" to watch an SMB-mounted repository directory and somehow get results back from it, or run a local VM in a Vagrant style, do the checks there and feed them back to text editor or something like that?

[mcMickJuice]

+1

[aikeru]

I wonder how practical it would be to use one of the OCAML-to-JS compilers. I don't know any OCAML devs, but I know plenty of JavaScript/node developers and some of them might be willing to try contributing to porting flow to node. If someone with enough OCAML knowledge could make a compile of flow that would just leave unimplemented function calls or ... something ... for the C or platform-specific bits in a JavaScript compiled version of flow, I wonder how much effort it would take to implement those functions.

Does anyone see this as a viable idea? I don't think I have time to learn OCAML and its ecosystem just for flow, but I might have some time to put into a node.js-based port of it. If someone gave step-by-step instructions I could use those to build to JS from this project on Linux and then work to port that to Windows. ...and +1 btw. Not having an official port on Windows totally sucks.

[aikeru]

Ok, even facebook is doing it http://flowtype.org/docs/coming-soon.html Is there any work toward this "using js_of_ocaml" as listed on the coming soon page? Is that part of fb's effort to make this cross-platform?

[doberkofler]

+1

[stuartallenmills]

+1

[StarpTech]

+1

[gabelevi]

Hi everyone! Sorry for the long radio silence! I'm happy to announce that @OCamlPro-Bozman and @OcamlPro-Henry will be working on building full Windows support for Flow! We're very excited to work with them and very excited to allow Windows users to use Flow!

We're just spinning this project up, so it will be a few months until this is completely ready. The development will happen through GitHub, so those who are interested can follow along :)

[aikeru]

@gabelevi please share as much as you can with the community! No doubt you have many willing potential testers and possibly even code contributors.

[webuniverseio]

Awesome news, thank you @gabelevi and OCamlPro team! :)

[gabelevi]

@aikeru The plan is to build Windows support as a sequence of pull requests against this repository and https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/tree/master/hphp/hack (which is the source of truth for Hack, upon which Flow is built). So you should be able to follow along to your hearts content! And I think @OCamlPro-Bozman and @OcamlPro-Henry will be very happy to have all the testers they can find when they're ready!

[StoneCypher]

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[josephwoodward]

Amazing news! Can't wait!

[kobezzza]

+1

[trikadin]

:+1:

[cyc0der]

+1

[barak007]

Can someone explain why this is not written in Javascript? I want to flow in the browser......

[webuniverseio]

@barak007, there is a little bit of discussion earlier in this thread.

[lefessan]

@barak007, there is a very efficient OCaml to Javascript compiler (js_of_ocaml), so there is no reason why Flow would not be able to work in the browser. I imagine that such a version will appear at some point in the future.

About OCaml vs Javascript, all programming languages are just not equivalent. OCaml has features, such as static typing and deep pattern-matching that makes development much simpler and faster than in Javascript, and cheaper to maintain on the long term. For simple programs, it does not make a big difference, but for bigger programs, such as the Flow compiler, the difference is huge...

[webuniverseio]

@gabelevi, @OCamlPro-Bozman, @OCamlPro-Henry Looks like there were some work done already to adopt flow codebase for windows. I wonder if you guys have any update for those who are curious and impatient like me? :smile: Regardless of your answer thank you for hard work.