Redpanda - build crc32cer failed on Windows

Questions / Help
1

Happy New Year everyone! :tada:

I’m trying to set up Kafka/Redpanda development on Windows 11 with Elixir, and I’m running into issues compiling crc32cer.

During mix deps.compile crc32cer, I see that the NIF build is controlled by a hook like:

{pre_hooks, [{"(linux|darwin|solaris|freebsd)", compile, "make nif"}]}

However, on Windows the NIF never gets built (crc32cer_nif_not_found at runtime). The priv/ directory is not created and no .dll is produced, so Kafka producers fail due to missing CRC32C support.

My questions:

  1. Is it actually possible to compile and use crc32cer natively on Windows 11?
  2. Or is the expected / recommended setup to run Elixir in WSL2 or Docker (Linux) when using Kafka clients that depend on crc32cer?
  3. Has anyone successfully used Kafka (brod / kafka_protocol) on native Windows BEAM without WSL?

I’m fine switching to WSL2 if that’s the intended path, but I wanted to confirm whether native Windows support is realistic or not.

Thanks in advance, and happy hacking in 2026! :rocket:

2

Out of curiosity for redpanda and nifs, I dug into this a bit, here is what I found:

It looks like some maintenance burden was dropped in favor of using google’s crc32cer library? ( just a guess )

It might be worth taking a look at the google library to see if you can get it to compile on windows?

What is the use case for compiling it to windows? Local development, production deployment?