I use Promela & Spin for modeling concurrency in a course I teach. I've been using the jspin front end as well. I have students who are trying to install the tools on Windows 8 and they are having a tough time - I don't know if its a 64 bit vs. 32 bit problem or the version of gcc they're using or something else completely.
So I'm looking for anyone who has a working configuration of these tools under Windows 8 who could provide some help in the way of the tool chain used, etc.
Probably it is an x64 related problem, one of my students also had problems with Spin on an x64 machine, since the compiled executables on the Spin site only comprise an x86 version for Windows. On my x86 installation of Windows 8.1 the executable works flawlessly. To compile the code for the verifiers, I'd suggest MinGW (choose the "GNU C/C++ compiler" and "Basic MinGW" installation in the installation wizard). This works fine for me.
In order to run Spin on an x64 machine, you probably need Cygwin as an emulator, and compile the Spin sources from scratch as described in the instructions for Linux systems.
Hope this helps ;)
Remark: Compiling Spin with MinGW/MSYS did not work, at least for me, because there are some calls to native Linux functions that are not supplied by Windows. Cygwin should work however, since Cywin is (according to their website) "a way to magically make native Windows apps aware of UNIX® functionality like signals, ptys, etc. Again, you need to build your apps from source if you want to take advantage of Cygwin functionality.", and this seems indeed to be the problem here.
