One final opinion on installation of things on Windows in general: these days I mostly try to install things from the Microsoft Store (which mimics my "application" experience on macOS, iOS, and Android) but for non-store things I'd sort of expect an MSI-based installation. Until this thread here, I didn't even know there was a Powershell Gallery and until I first tried early versions of the Clojure PS Alpha install script, I'd actually never used Powershell -- I'd always used cmd (as limited as it was). My experiences with Powershell so far have been... underwhelming... and I still tend to open cmd by preference if I have to do something on the command-line of Windows that I can't do via WSL2 accessing /mnt/c. But I'm probably a very atypical Windows developer...

@chaos I'm interested in your thoughts on how Leiningen has handled this for years? I haven't heard too many complaints over the years about Windows users downloading lein.bat, and either putting it on their PATH or using a full path to it, and running it in cmd (I assume). It forgoes an "installer" completely and "self-installs" itself on first use. I'm wondering whether a clj.bat (or clojure.bat) that users downloaded and used "like Leiningen", and which "self-installs" the JARs and config etc on first use would be "better" than the status quo? @alexmiller is that what you had in mind for the .bat column or were you still thinking of an explicit install step that set up the .bat script and everything else?

@alexmiller for your installer options there is also https://chocolatey.org/, not terribly familiar with it, but I think it is another popular alternative.

@borkdude, I suppose that maybe an nbb Clojure script compiled to an exe might also work? Is that possible and/or potentially interesting?

Also could list a babashka script. But then the runtime dependency would be babashka, which is probably not good. But could list it for completeness.

It might also be interesting to survey what other languages do for installers on Windows to see if there is any commonality.

Here's a start: https://forge.rust-lang.org/infra/other-installation-methods.html seems to support it all. Package managers like chocotaley or scoop or an msi. You pick. https://go.dev/doc/install seems to have gone with msi. https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3108/ has an exe installer, and a zip. https://nodejs.org/en/download/ has msi and zip. https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/installation/#winget seems to have gone with chocolatey and winget https://adoptium.net/installation/ docs suggest winget or msi, (I personally used scoop, probably a community supported effort) https://www.scala-lang.org/download/ uses an exe installer (which might be an installer to install scala? dunno) https://groovy.apache.org/download.html has binaries or a community supported msi installer

That’s super helpful (and very confusing)

I'd like to rise one more issue that community members faced. False positives on malware detection (by Windows Defender). Sometimes, rarely, but it happened multiple times. Distributed binaries, even zip files were marked as malware 😞

Hi @seancorfield, do you happen to know if the State of Clojure survey does account for prospective new Clojure users that tried or wanted to try Clojure perhaps only to be put off by the PS installer and the strange installation question you get right at the beginning (which directory to install it to) or the difficulty installing it on corporate windows environments? Maybe this number is significant (no data to support my claim). I've started with Leiningen, which is still a breeze to use (it just works), and personally I am amazed with how much thought they put into it both the main program and the extra mile they took in creating the .bat file. One drops the bat file in their project, and they are just a lein away from using it on windows (exactly the same experience on unix). It nowadays faces the same hurdles with strict corporate firewalls policies on windows, one needs to know how to setup the proxy/certificates to bootstrap itself by downloading its main jar file from the internet. I think there are two separate problems to be addressed, installation and usage, both super important, and the clojure team have addressed this very well on unix (brew installer, bash script invocation). I know none in person who uses PS, and it has its own operating concepts which are foreign to most people and hard to follow even for experience developers. I assume it is only used by devops and nobody else, so I would argue using it as the starting point for Clojure newcomers did not turn out to the the best of choices. Perhaps if the clojure team still wans to go with the PS solution in the short/mid term, a streamlined installation process that brings it on par with Unix (the PowerShell gallery if it works?) addresses the installation point, while better instructions on how to get you started in Clojure with PS might address a big portion of the usability question (make documentation more prominent and beginners friendly, suggestion to use Windows Terminal which is very good looking and has ton of functionality and begins with a PS shell). I would like to categorize the quoting issue into usability and treat it as a separate general problem (that has a worse impact on PS). I think there is a solution around it that solves it for good (program takes control of escaping). I hope to have something to present to you really soon, I still need to test the idea in practice, but could be a step towards the right direction regardless as food for thought. I hope to be able to share some results soon given that the conversation about better windows tools support has started in earnest here. The standard windows installers, scoop and chocolatey do not work on corporate environments, this is something sysadmin avoid like the plague. These installers cover so many applications that they are a no-no for sysadmins from the start, and I haven't seen a way around using them in these environments. Thanks

A third separate issue (1 is installer 2 is launcher) that I see us touching on is cli ease of use for all platforms. This includes things like having to specify a string as '"imastring"'. This is the type of usability issue that https://github.com/babashka/cli addresses. I think seeing this as a separate issue, if only to treat it as out of scope for the launcher, is helpful.

@chaos can you briefly recap the locked-down bigcorp acceptable installer options? msi? exe installer? winget? other?

for the non-locked down crowd, thanks to all of @ales.najmann's hard work I think Clojure's current Windows users are probably familiar with scoop.

It should be possible for a single msi installer artifact to be made available standalone and also republished into scoop/winget/chocolatey/etc

Since Oracle only delivers x64 Java installers for Windows, I think we can remove the concern in the grid for supported architectures for graalvm binaries

Good point, I think it might still have an x86 windows installer for jdk8, but only see x64 past that.

Side thought: Is memory footprint of the launcher something to care about?

And startup time (graalvm binaries do well in both regards)

graalvm binaries also support exec calls so the memory can be freed when launching the java process, if that is a concern

If I would have to pick an alternative binary creating solution I'd probably go for golang as it's easy to cross-compile to static binaries. But yeah, you would have to write golang. Might not be too bad compared to bash though.

I was thinking same for same reasons.

But having the tooling for a language in the same language definitely has benefits too

Yeah, it is definitely better for optics and marketing.

I don't think the core team cares much about marketing by building tooling to show off. One example of this is ask.clojure being a PHP website. Pragmatics for the win ;). But I think it has benefits of just being able to jump in and understand "the script" because it's in Clojure.

Yeah, probably true. I guess the marketing, if people would care to read between the lines, is that the core team is pragmatic.

we don't care about the marketing aspect of that. I personally care about what I have to maintain

in order, I care about: user's experience, being able to maintain it, clojure ftw

powershell was a reasonably close port from a maintenance pov and (I assumed) would result in a reasonable user experience, but I think experience has shown otherwise

It might be interesting to see what a launcher would look like in written in Go. Not necessarily to choose it, but just to see what that would look like. Any experienced Go devs in the crowd here?

I've done some go (some babashka pods are written in that) but I think you can imagine it would look similar to Java, but different, more if err != nil checks. Just look at any golang script to get a taste of it ;)

So how about a proof of concept MSI installer which bundles deps.exe and the clojure tools .jar , copies deps.exe to clojure.exe and clj.exe in a directory automatically added to the PATH, copies the tools jar to C:\Users\<user>\.deps.clj (see deps.clj code for expected location). This should give you a feeling for how well the installation experience is, while having a taste of clj as an exe (`deps.exe` should already work as drop in currently, but deliberately isn't called clj.exe to prevent conflicts). After that, we could continue thinking about what has to change about deps.exe or alternatives, if that doesn't tick all the boxes

Oh yeah, good detail: if we move away from powershell, will need a migration guide, which would basically be, I guess, instructions on how to uninstall the powershell module.

Tangent: for making release available for various package managers (maybe in general, not just for Windows) might be worth looking at something like https://jreleaser.org/. Never used it, just stumbled upon it now.