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Comment by elliotlai | Hacker News Reader

@antirez said: sorry, NO THANKS!!

No I did not ;) What I think is:

1) It's cool to see Redis ported on win32, especially now that they are trying to provide an implementation that can persist asynchronously and so forth.

2) Not interested in backporting changes into the main Redis codebase at the moment, because there are little reasons to deploy on WIN32 IMHO, and the changes to the code base are massive.

So it's interesting, it's listed in the "download" page of hte official site as an external project, but there are no solid reasons to make the official code base more complex.

because there are little reasons to deploy on WIN32 IMHO

There are plenty of reasons to deploy on Windows, and it has lost Redis a lot of momentum and wins that it doesn't support it.

I'd love to see some figures or even anecdotes backing that up.

That's not snark- I'm genuinely curious.

There are 88 million (~15% of total) web sites hosted on Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server#Market_share). That's 88 million reasons.

If you're running your web server on the same host as your redis server, in my experience you're doing it wrong.

That doesn't necessarily mean that they run it on the same host. It simply means that for some reason a lot of people have chosen Windows as their web platform (which could be as simple as familiarity). It is foolhardy to dismiss that massive platform.

We've had this discussion a while ago. The outcome is that it's antirez's call. There's plenty of us who'd like him to take out a few months to drop new features and do windows portability instead, but it's his call. If antirez would always take the easy way after some user space resistance, he'd be a mysql contributor.

The outcome is that it's antirez's call.

Absolutely true. He owes me or anyone else nothing. I am not saying that he should do it, I'm just replying to the specific statement about deploying on Windows. There are plenty of reasons someone might prefer to deploy on Windows, which explains why almost all successful technologies have first-class windows options (Mongodb, PHP, Ruby, Apache, MySQL, postresql, Membase, and on and on and on).

Generally speaking there are two things that can happen if Redis win32 support is put in the main code line: it succeeds on win32 or it fails on win32.

If it succeeds on win32 then, based on previous history, we can assume that similar functionality will be added in some oblique fashion to Microsoft SQL Server. At that point Microsoft would, based on previous history, withdraw support from Redis so it could provide its customers a better experience by concentrating all of its resources on the MS SQL product. Lacking support, Redis on win32, would whither and die on that platform.

If Redis on win32 doesn't succeed then one would expect Microsoft to withdraw support and Redis on win32, lacking support, would whither and die on that platform.

Edit to add Not saying Redis can't succeed on win32, just that it can't be completely dependent on Microsoft to do so.

now i see! thank you for your great works :)

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