As of a few minutes ago, I have confirmed with a couple of friends that the Windows and MacOS installers work on their computers. This is pretty great to see, because I'm always nervous when initially distributing software packages that they are somehow tied to my machine.

On MacOS, this turned out to be very true. I had been using a modern Clang compiler, instead of Apple's piece-of-junk ancient "Apple Clang" (aka We Like To Punish Developers Clang). Well, that turned out to be a distribution nightmare, since the binaries I created were linking against a homebrew Clang libstdc++, and Apple doesn't like static linking, etc. So now I'm back on Apple Clang (which from now on I will refer to as Crapple Clang).

After that, I found out that the MacOS binaries I was producing were tied to MacOS 14. I tried a bunch of things to fix this before finally finding the right CMake flags to target MacOS 11 as the baseline version. That led me a down a rabbit hole with how to create my own vcpkg "triplet" (I hate that term) to get vcpkg to build my dependencies also targeting MacOS 11. But again, to vcpkg's credit, once I got it set up correctly, it Just Worked. Which is nice.

Now that I've seen the installers succeed on a couple of non-Evan machines, I'll feel comfortable starting the pre-alpha. I'm sure lots more issues will come up, but at least I've worked out the most basic "it doesn't even install" issues before handing out the installers to a few more people.