Why SML/SMS doesn't run on Windows - and why that's a feature

Let me tell you a story.

I was leading a raid in World of Warcraft. 24 people. Everyone waiting on me. And Windows decided that exact moment was the perfect time for an update. No warning. No mercy. Just a reboot.

I switched to Mac the next day.

For years it was great. Steve Jobs understood something most tech CEOs never will: the user is not the product. The user is the guest. You treat guests with respect.

Then Steve left us.

And slowly - update by update, policy by policy - Apple became just another corporation. A beautiful one. But one that now decides what software you can run, what hardware you can repair, and what belongs to you and what belongs to them.

So here we are.

We are building SMS - a programming language that compiles to native binaries via LLVM. Open source. GPL-3. No telemetry. No stakeholders. No investors.

It runs on Mac and Linux. Not on Windows - and that is not an oversight. That is a choice.

Because we are not building for a world where your OS reboots your raid.
We are not building for a world where a corporation decides what runs on your machine.
We are building for the world we actually want to live in.

Ahimsa. Do no harm. Not even to your users.

If you are on Windows and want to try SMS - WSL2 works fine. One small rebellion inside the machine.

But if you are tired of building software on platforms that belong to someone else - come build with us.

SMS is free. Linux is free. Your time is not.

https://codeberg.org/CrowdWare/sms-cpp