Ship Atom for Windows about electron

[zcbenz]

I just added a section on development in Wiki, you can find build instructions there: https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/wiki#development.

Currently many basic features have been implemented for atom-shell on Windows, but there are still a lot of work need to be done:

1. Native node module support
2. Window menu API
3. File dialog API
4. Auto updater
5. Crash reporter
6. Some other little features

Of course the auto updater and crash reporter are not necessary at first.

After the Windows support of atom-shell is done, we need to make sure all native node module used by Atom work well, some of them are heavily platform-dependent (like node-pathwatcher and node-spellchecker), so it would take some time.

After all these had been done, I think we could start working on Atom for Window.

[anaisbetts]

Native node module support

Can you tell me more about this? I grok everything else but this one I'm not sure I fully understand. Do you mean, being able to compile native node modules?

[zcbenz]

I mean being able to both compile and load native node modules.

Usually with npm, native modules are built against upstream node's headers and libraries (node.lib), so they can not be loaded by atom-shell because atom-shell is using a different version of V8 which is shipped by Chromium.

In order to make atom-shell support native modules, we need to provide our own headers and node.lib, which can tell the linker to link the module to atom-shell's binary, and then use npm or node-gyp to compile modules against them, this part will be done by apm.

In Mac and Linux, this is relative easy because providing correct headers is enough to compile native modules for atom-shell, however in Windows, we need to provide an import library file node.lib, which makes things more complicated because we not only need to link the module to atom-shell's executable, but also the libchromiumcontent.dll.

[mcolyer]

I think we should close this out now and instead focus on the specific remaining issues. Thoughts?

[zcbenz]

Agreed.