For various historical reasons my primary development system is now based on Windows XP, but with daily contributions from OSX and Linux. This means that if I'm to use Thrift, I need a Thrift compiler on XP. This is why I have spent the better part of a day making that happen.
I'm still not certain if i've got everything right, or even if I've gotten enough right for my installation to be really useful, but I do have a running version of the thrift compiler and it seems to be compiling thrift code written by someone else on my project so I have good feeling about this.
Now: What did I have to do in order to get thrift up&running?
- First I took a peek at this page that explains some things that needs to be done. I tried the binaries, but they are useless and obsolete, so next I tried to compile things for myself. I chose the Cygwin option.
- First attempt failed badly, no malloc or free found in (lib/cpp/src/Thrift.cpp), so I added "#include
" and that bug disappeared. - Then I had to move my ant installation to somewhere without a space in its path (that wasn't so hard, I just made a junction (the windows version of hard links) from C:/ to the old installation and put the location in the path). Since paths are hardwired into the makefiles, I had to run ./configure to make this change valid.
- Then many and varied strange things happened. I didn't really catch on to what what was happening until I saw something along the lines of "FIND " (some error message). The clue here was the capitalized FIND. This indicated that it was windows's find-implementation, not cygwin's that was being used by the make scripts. So I had to change all instances of "find" to "/usr/local/find". I guess i could have changed my path instead, but I didn't. You might want to try to change the path before rewriting all the makefiles :-)
- Then tings compiled. The compilation stopped with some error message, I restarted it, the compilation continued and finally terminated successfully.
- I ran "make install" and got myself a thrift.exe installation in /usr/local/bin (cygwin path).
I won't claim that this will work for anyone else, or even to claim very strongly that it has worked for me yet, but this is what I did, and so far it seems to have produced an useful result.
The mind boggles at the fact that this is actually (probably) the simplest way to get a decent RPC mechanism compiled on windows XP in 2010.
