It's a fact that people love their development platform and want to stick with it. I'm a die hard Solaris fan, and would never dream of switching to something else. I've heard that there is a crowd out there that likes to work on other systems like Windows, MacOSX, BSD and Linux. That the developer use a platform during development doesn't necessary mean that the target product will run on the platform, but the developer is more productive on that platform.
People can argue as much as they want, but there is a large crowd of developers using Windows. There is also a large number of systems running some version of Windows, so enabling them to use the projects I'm working on is a good thing. Earlier today I pushed a branch that adds support for building libmemcached into a dll on Windows.
90% of the source code in libmemcached is just "logic" that applies for all platforms, but there is a small part of the code that interacts tightly with the operating system. "Everything" is a file descriptor on Unix systems, but Windows got their own subsystem for sockets called WinSock. In order to avoid getting tonns of #ifdefs all over the code, I defined memcached_socket_t to represent a socket object, and used "the WinSock way" to implement the code. It is pretty easy to map the WinSock code to work on Unix systems with a couple of macros.
Well, enough talk. If you're interested in the details you can check out the branch on Launchpad.
The easiest way for you to test out the code is to install the fullinstall of msysgit. Unfortunately it doesn't come with all of the tools needed to build libmemcached (you can't generate a configure script and generate the documentation). This means that you cannot build the development branch unless you got another machine where you can generate the configure script. I am exporting parts of my ZFS filesystem via CIFS, so I generated the configure script on Solaris.
Building libmemcached with mingw is just as easy as on your favorite platform:
$ ./configure --with-memcached=--without-docs $ make all install
I haven't fixed the test suite yet, so you have to wait a bit longer before you can run make test ;)
