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The elegant Io language should not be passed by just because you are running Microsoft Windows.

Io is an Actor model post-Self language which has retained Smalltalk-like syntax. Think of it as a javascript which will be distributed computing friendly and will not become ECMA’d.

The first problem is that like so many projects in opensource, you will have to build: there are no complete and current binaries for Windows available at the time of writing.

Do not despair. Get git ( see my post on this under ‘git python’ ) and git the Io sources.

You may have to build/install more than once to get things working smoothly, so here is my advice.

First make a backup of your new source directory. This will allow you to replace the working area as you see fit.

Now to build ( from your working directory, say e:\io )

First edit the makefile and set the prefix to something other than /usr/local

I am using /io070410 as my destination directory for the version io-2007-04-10 (and that version is according to the file IoVersion.h in the ./iovm/source directory)

Save with a reliable editor such as TextPad which is smart enough to save Ansi unix format.

Now we bash:

unset OS
CC=gcc.exe
export CC
LIB=/cygdrive/E/io:$LIB
export LIB
PATH=/cygdrive/E/io:$LIB
export PATH
make
make install

The first thing that I do is go to my install destination directory and see what works in ./bin

In my case only io_static.exe works in bash. io.exe just starts and vanishes. No big deal: just copy the libiovmall.dll from the destination ./lib to your ./bin

Presto, you have io.exe.

And there is a note in my blog here about using rlwrap to get cmd line history for the Io interpreter.