Now I found the FFI problem with MinGW , I was missing some old compilation flags on my CMake scripts. I still have to fix this same bug with MSVC, but at least normal Pharo image can eval "1+1" without crashing, and stdout is working properly now in Windows. During the rest of the week I will make this VM variant working completely on Linux, Windows and OS X, with SDL2 and hopefully we will get OSWindow working alot better in Windows and Mac. (In Linux it was already working pretty well, probably because each X connection has its own event queue).

Interesting to note Microsoft is moving to Clang [1] to replace their
C1 front-end, which should(?) make cross-platform with OSX and Linux a
bit easier. Anyone know if that means MVSC might be better to use on
its own than using MinGW/Cygwin?

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/21/microsoft_promises_clang_for_windows_in_november_visual_c_update/

cheers -ben
In Windows the standard compiler is MSVC, despite it has a poorer quality than gcc/clang. The movement to the clang front-end is something where it is not possible to rely until it becomes stable.
It is quite clear that the VM is not meant to be used with MSVC, because it is not being built and tested with it all of the time. However, in some platforms, the only alternative is MSVC.

Best regards,
Ronie

2016-11-28 0:46 GMT-03:00 Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com>:

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 5:01 AM, phil@highoctane.be <phil@highoctane.be> wrote:
>
> Ronie,
>
> Is all of this in a branch somewhere so that I can have a look?
>
> For cairo, I think that I can build it with another compiler than MinGW, it doesn't really matter as it just makes a dll (or well, I can just skip that and reuse an already built one).
>
> -ltro is the flag that makes the whole thing trips up in GCC5 and requires additional flags, but adding them just kicked the can down the road a bit further as they were still unresolved symbols. Need to see why cairo build gives that but seems a cairo issue that others are facing as well. May end up building cairo with the old compiler but this defeats the purpose.
>
> For VS2015, I've got it too and yes, the debugging facilities are much better, not to mention that the compilation times are much nicer. GCC is just dog slow on Windows compared to Linux. I read that it was because of sub-bar fork support in Windows.

Interesting to note Microsoft is moving to Clang [1] to replace their
C1 front-end, which should(?) make cross-platform with OSX and Linux a
bit easier. Anyone know if that means MVSC might be better to use on
its own than using MinGW/Cygwin?

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/21/microsoft_promises_clang_for_windows_in_november_visual_c_update/

cheers -ben