RFQ: Windows editing environment

[alexeagle]

Windows support is always a problem, usually because one of us says "I don't have a Windows machine to test on". I think we should eliminate this lame excuse.
https://coder.com/ has nice support for remote development environment, where you still use your same editor locally. If the Rules Authors SIG sponsored some cloud compute for this (or maybe Google donates a GCP project?) then I think we could get to a nice DX where you can click something to make a Windows machine, wait a few minutes, then open your VS Code and you're already using a cmd.exe terminal and running bazel commands on there.

slack context: https://bazelbuild.slack.com/archives/CDCMRLS23/p1726679418009819

[alexeagle]

I put this on the agenda for the next SIG meeting

[cgrindel]

This was discussed at the Bazel Rules Author SIG meeting on 2024-10-29. General consensus that there is a benefit to having Windows dev environments. It sounds like setting up coder.com account may not be sufficient as we may need to provide runners.

Open questions

• Who wants to own this effort?
• Where should the runners live?
• How should we fund them if necessary?

Runner Options

• https://opensource.microsoft.com/azure-credits/
• Google Cloud has Windows runners