To be fair, the gaps between linux, osx, freebsd, and android are like a creek to the oceanic gap between any of them and windows support that most C++ windows devs I know (who are largely professional game devs) will consider useful. You aren't asking them to tweak a few things here and there to make a build go, you're asking them to make it fit a completely different system. You may find a volunteer willing to make that happen, but I don't think telling them they're all lazy bums compared to that guy who manages the freebsd port is going to get them there.

I also really want to be clear, as someone who's a huge fan of rust (from a distance so far) and wants to see it succeed, those windows devs will never agree with you about it being first class so long as it requires mingw to build. I know it makes things a lot easier when porting, but if it doesn't play nice with VC++ they won't give it a second look.

  > You aren't asking them to tweak a few things here and 
  > there to make a build go, you're asking them to make it 
  > fit a completely different system.

Precisely. Given this, is it such a surprise that Rust was initially written to use MinGW on Windows rather than MSVC back when it was an understaffed two-man project?

I should also note that porting to MSVC is a blocker for 1.0. It'll get done, we're just not sure by whom yet. Tell your friends: http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/o3VZWfwD

I admire what you're doing, but I find the assertion that Windows is a first-class Rust platform difficult to square with your repeated requests for more Windows volunteers to make that happen. Windows developers are everywhere. Why doesn't Mozilla hire some Windows experts for the Rust team?

Mozilla is continually hiring new people to work on Rust. They haven't yet hired any Windows experts because better Windows integration is merely a high priority, and not the highest priority (that would be stabilizing the design of the language itself).

If you know any Windows devs with the appropriate experience, it couldn't hurt to have them apply: http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/o3VZWfwD

Agreed. The message from Mozilla is that "Windows is really important to us, please come do it". Meanwhile they're paying for the development of yet another Unix-style package manager.

Clearly there is a list of priorities that guide these investments, and Windows support doesn't rank very high on that list.

  > Meanwhile they're paying for the development of yet 
  > another Unix-style package manager.

A package manager that will be platform-independent, and thus benefit Windows devs as well. At Rust's current state it's hardly surprising that they've chosen to allocate resources to efforts that will benefit all platforms equally. Meanwhile, the community for every platform but Windows is chomping at the bit to submit improvements. No doubt they're still holding out for the Windows community to do the same, without having to resort to hiring a dev specifically for Windows. But it will happen, if it has to.

In the meantime, if you know any experienced Windows devs looking for jobs working on Rust, please point them towards http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/o3VZWfwD

You should really put more effort to get Rust work smooth on Windows withouth counting on volunteers.

Think of MySQL vs Postgres adoption. I belive that at the certain moment the primary reason that all Apache/PHP stack devs were choosing MySQL over Postgres was that MySQL was very easy installable on Windows (all these LAMP/WAMP packages that were creating ready-to-use dev environoment).