Redis is simple but powerful memory-based key/value DB and it supports various programming languages. As it is like a dark horse of web, you can easily find any of its drivers for popular web programming languages. But, if you don’t write code for web and use C/C++, don’t worry! They have official C client library called hiredis also.

As you expected, of course, it works well if you are under Linux-based machine. The problem is hiredis does not support Windows compile by itself. So, you have to port its source code to Windows, huh?

Right, it’s not a good idea and not even easy for ordinary C/C++ programmer. You may think you can find some with googling. Okay, here’s my story.

I’m a game server programmer and decided to use Redis for my game. Because I had an experience with hiredis on my Mac, I didn’t expect I will spend such a long time for that – almost a whole work day.

Firstly, as other programmers usually do, I’ve googled about hiredis for windows compile and got the link. Even though the project was a little bit old, it’s under control by Microsoft! I’ve just kept following blog instruction and it worked in some wise. But, as Microsoft’s hard situation, it vomited tons of link errors I could not solve easily, while testing pub/sub functionality. I consumed most of my time to figure it out and almost gave up, almost.

At that moment, by chance, I thought about Node.js. If I google ‘hiredis windows’, the top most result is ‘hiredis – npm’. Node.js is built by C++ and I could get some clue from it. If I followed the link and there was Eldorado!

Windows

Dmitry Gorbunov (@fuwaneko) made a fork of hiredis-node with Windows support.

That fork works clearly + perfectly! No additional code is needed at all. Pub/sub works nicely, too. Node saved my life and everybody live in peace.

That’s how could I find Eldorado for a whole work day. If you encounter above situation, just ignore MSOpenTech and give your hands to Node.