Make windows a supported host platform

[hlopko]

From #832 (comment)

[hlopko]

CC @illicitonion

[UebelAndre]

Oh man, I have like, zero context for Windows... If it's on me to add support for it then it's gonna take a while 😅

Outside help would be extremely welcomed

[illicitonion]

I'm definitely not well-placed to help with this either :)

[UebelAndre]

@hlopko perhaps we could find an additional maintainer with some solid windows experience?

[kwonoj]

Sorry for random chime in, daily windows user and highly interested in this proj. (sadly not daily user of this rule).

Do we know what exactly aren't working / and what are the requirements to establish this goal? I'm curious if there's some step-by-step goals can gradually move over, or there is a major blockers that requires some fundamental changes to move forward.

[UebelAndre]

Hello! Super excited to hear there's interest in windows support 😄

For starters, there are some disabled targets (#613, #614, #615, #617, #618) which should be enabled to have parity with other platforms. That'd be the best place to start.

Following that, there are some under tested features (#540, as just an example) which would need to be investigated to make sure the appropriate feature set was supported on windows. I think these will either be uncovered in enabling the rest of the targets in CI or we'll need to add some targets to run in CI across all platforms.

At the end of the day though, if you're interested in the project definitely try to do some fun stuff with the rules on the platform. This is what got me so involved in the first place and am happy to support "Rustacean"'s quest to add more support for Rust to Bazel 🦀

[hlopko]

Thanks @kwonoj! Let us know if you need any further help.

In general, I'll say that the fact that a platform is not supported doesn't mean we don't care. We're happy for all contributions and we will not intentionally break existing usecases. It just means we don't have the expertise (so we may break things unintentionally, or we may design solutions in a way that makes them unsuitable for Widows) or capacity to effectively resolve issues of Windows users.

Fixing all those issues is a great start, but I'd only want to "officially" support Windows if there is expertise and capacity to help users on Windows in the maintainers team.

[UebelAndre]

I have no windows knowledge. Unassigned myself as I can't really offer much value here. I do think it would be valuable to have windows support but I feel largely that Bazel ignores Windows thus it's unbearable difficult to deal with windows in Bazel Rules repositories. If ever there's a part with vested interest in Bazel and windows experience I would defer to them in how to improve support for the platform.