Is anyone else amazed at how many people use nginx on Windows?

[Hendry Lee]

I'm just a lurker so far, but this issue may impact the future of nginx, which I do care about so I'll give this a shot. Feel free to disregard this if you wish.

I am with others who think that a Windows port of nginx may be useful, but Igor should NOT spend too much time on it. Ok, I lie. I think Windows port should be left outside of the primary nginx effort.

Unless of course, he has some agenda or commercial purpose behind it. For that, I think no one should interfere with that decision, although I personally think that building commercial company using nginx under opensource platform is a better alternative.

nginx is a wonderful piece of software. We are thankful for that.. 

With that said, I really can't think of a way why nginx should natively support Windows. Most people here use it for testing and web development. (Or are there big sites out there running nginx under Windows?)

A lot of people appreciate the small memory footprint and use nginx for development platform. I myself have created VMware image loaded with nginx and WordPress for WP developers and written an article on how to setup nginx on Windows for testing WordPress.

But let's think about it. What nginx is REALLY for?

I think nginx is a great software to build high traffic web servers, and other features that I haven't used yet. And by porting to Windows natively, this wastes time that otherwise could be used to further improve nginx in this direction.

There are still a lot of sites that could have saved a lot by migrating to nginx. As nginx grows, people will be attracted to the stability and features added by the software. It is a much BETTER idea to focus on this instead of serving a need for Windows users, which account for a small portion of the nginx community, not to mention that it was not what it was designed to be.

Developing for Windows can only slow things down. And I think this is a BAD decision. Nginx can't satisfy everyone, nor should it try to. At least the time has not come yet for that kind of expansion. Let me elaborate.

Satisfying some developers who want to save a bit of memory under Windows will only hurt the software in the long run because like it or not this list has to support the whole new beast. That's (close to) a full time job, I think.

That's my 2 cents...

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Hendry Lee