Development Release 6 finally delivers stable Windows compatibility.

Collider.JAM shell is based on Node.js and it’s supposed to be portable… In theory. In practice, there are ALWAYS some issues.

Since I haven’t been using Windows for the last 13 years or so, I didn’t have a machine suitable for proper testing. I guess it was working for some time… Then I started to do some clever stuff with module scanning and unit discovery. And when you do something fancy with a filesystem, portability might suffer.

In our case, it was a little function responsible for mapping to a full path. It worked OK on Linux and MacOS, but failed to deliver a valid path on Windows.

DR6 is the first Collider.JAM release evaluated with our new test set called Geneva. And I figured, it a nice opportunity to cover Windows support.

So I’ve found a little Windows sticker on one of my Alienware Alphas, installed the OS along with Linux, and turned that machine into a test station. That allowed me to pinpoint and fix the bug on Windows.

Now that Alpha is dedicated to testing new releases. I can run tests against a git branch or a particular version from npm repo.

The only thing missing in this config is MacOS, and I still have to use an additional laptop to complete the portability test. Maybe a Mac Mini along with Alpha can be a solution to complete my testing stand?