Is this issue, and development for Windows environments in general, within the scope of ongoing work for ros2_rust?

@knmcguire do you want to give it a go at this? 🙂

So... what are you trying to say @esteve... that I'm the Windows person now?! 😜

JK absolutely, you can assign me. I actually have windows x pixi GH action for my personal website now 😄

But... there is a build issue on it still on the ros_idl message generation that I haven't debugged further (or made a ticket for). I'll dig in what exactly the problem is, make a ticket on the error and link that to this ticket.

It's probably best not to implement an CI just yet before we even get super hacky local build issue fixed... maybe? Or what do you think?

I made an issue here: ros2-rust/rosidl_rust#2. Will debug this further and once it builds then I can move on to this one

So... what are you trying to say @esteve... that I'm the Windows person now?! 😜

Sorry 😅

I just thought you might be interested in this, it'd be really cool to have support for Windows, but unfortunately I don't know if I can be of much help here.

I made an issue here: ros2-rust/rosidl_rust#2. Will debug this further and once it builds then I can move on to this one

Excellent, thank you!

There is a fix here! ros2-rust/rosidl_rust#2.

So the build continued until the next error in rclrs build.

  --- stderr
  thread 'main' panicked at C:\Users\kimbe\.cargo\registry\src\index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f\bindgen-0.70.1\lib.rs:622:27:
  Unable to find libclang: "couldn't find any valid shared libraries matching: ['clang.dll', 'libclang.dll'], set the `LIBCLANG_PATH` environment variable to a path where one of these files can be found (invalid: [])"
  note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace

Weirdly I have added libclang to the ROS 2 pixi environment, so the search continues!

Tada there is actually documentation on this! So I added libclang to pixi through condo, but I still had to set a LIBCLANG_PATH and change libclang-13.dll to libclang.dll.

All the other dependencies were already included in the pixi environment of the windows installation instructions of ROS2 and for building this package I still had to have MSVC 2019 installed anyway... but if we want to build the full ROS2 that will take a long time though... and is very big as well.

But... then you do get this!

(pixi_ros2_rolling) C:\dev\ws\rust_ros>ros2 run examples_rclrs_minimal_pub_sub minimal_publisher
Publishing: [Hello, world! 1]
Publishing: [Hello, world! 2]
Publishing: [Hello, world! 3]
Publishing: [Hello, world! 4]
Publishing: [Hello, world! 5]
Publishing: [Hello, world! 6]
Publishing: [Hello, world! 7]
Publishing: [Hello, world! 8]
Publishing: [Hello, world! 9]

(pixi_ros2_rolling) C:\dev\ws\rust_ros>ros2 run examples_rclrs_minimal_pub_sub minimal_subscriber

I heard: 'Hello, world! 6'
(Got 1 messages so far)
I heard: 'Hello, world! 7'
(Got 2 messages so far)
I heard: 'Hello, world! 8'
(Got 3 messages so far)
I heard: 'Hello, world! 9'
(Got 4 messages so far)

Once ros2-rust/rosidl_rust#3 is merged then I can work on a github action for the windows CI

@knmcguire that is really cool! Thank you so much for looking into it

No problem! There are currently a couple issues in windows that I think that needs to be solved before we add it to CI. This is one of them: ros2/ros2_documentation#5384