The Elixir experience on Windows is deteriorating

[josevalim]

@eteeselink

This is just too hard. Ideally, running elixir-websetup.exe should be enough to compile and run Elixir code. It used to be, but it isn’t anymore.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the knowledge required to maintain “elixir-websetup.exs”. So if someone is interested in improving the Windows experience, please do! We would really appreciate it: GitHub - elixir-lang/elixir-windows-setup: Online Elixir Installer powered by Inno Setup · GitHub

Although it is a bit frustrating that the experience got worse. Why code that worked in the past can’t just continue work?

@eteeselink

Then came Phoenix’s Comeonin dependency in Phoenix, which added a NIF compilation requirement,

To be clear:

• Phoenix does not depend on comeonin
• Comeonin has an algorithm (Pbkdf2) that does not have native dependencies. That’s also the algorithm we picked for the Programming Phoenix book precisely because of Windows users

@eteeselink

Here’s what I did:

Aye, this is painful indeed. Sorry to hear.

It is the first time I hear about this. So somehow the reports are not surfacing up, thanks for writing one.

I think we can at least do one action here: Ship Erlang/OTP versions in the Elixir installer that are compatible with the precompiled Elixir - this should eliminate at least part of the issue. It has the downside that Windows users will be a bit behind, but if they want to get the latest Erlang, they can always get it in other ways. Thoughts?

However, I am afraid that to use 32-bits by default, we will need to change the installer. I think the installer gives you the option to choose, but it is checked by default depending on your system settings.

Quick question: how did you install Erlang 22.0 on Windows? Did you use Erlang/OTP’s official installer?

Also, please do open up a report on Erlang/OTP about crypto.

@NobbZ

It provides the --werl flag though, which will start in its own terminal emulator, which does support advanced input methods, but still not colored output.

Yes, you need to do iex --werl. There is also a USE_WERL environment variable that you can enable to always use werl. Regarding colored output, Windows still does not support ANSI escapes.

EDIT: I also want to add that both the OTP and Elixir team have CIs running on Windows, so it seems most of the issues are in the integration with the moving parts of the OS (crypto, 32vs64bits, etc).