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But unless you are confined to Windows, that doesn't really matter, does it? Most code for Windows seems to be written using Microsoft's own tools as far as I k

But unless you are confined to Windows, that doesn't really matter, does it? Most code for Windows seems to be written using Microsoft's own tools as far as I know, which makes both the people asking for FOSS tools and the people that make FOSS tools to begin with less likely to target Windows.

tonyarkles 9y ago
The beauty of CMake, for me, is that it can generate both Makefiles and VS2015 files. An example that I've posted here before about was a userland USB driver backed by libusb. I wrote it in idiomatic C++11 (or C++14, don't remember exactly), and amazingly I was able to generate a .so, a .dyld, and a .dll from the same source code, without needing a single #ifdef. Built using gcc on Linux, clang on OSX, and VS2015 on Windows. CMake would output Makefiles on the first two, and a VS solution file on Windows that I could build. I'm still amazed by it a couple years later.
mwfunk 9y ago
That's a pretty ginormous "but unless...". It would not surprise me if more people are building and using Boost than all other platforms put together. I haven't done any Windows development in 10+ years, but it's not like everyone else stopped when I did.
vinkelhake 9y ago
We're in the context of Boost here and it has great support for Windows. Switching to a build system that doesn't have mature support for Windows is simply a non-starter for the Boost project. That a lot of FOSS projects (understandably) have poor support for Windows doesn't mean that all of them do. It also doesn't mean there isn't demand for FOSS projects on that platform.
geezerjay 9y ago
> But unless you are confined to Windows, that doesn't really matter, does it? Yeah, why should 80% of the OS market share mind to people who develop software for a living?