8 ms·

Your advice would have more weight if you provided some arguments. GNU tools are also good enough, and this kit seems like a lot easier way to get started with

Your advice would have more weight if you provided some arguments. GNU tools are also good enough, and this kit seems like a lot easier way to get started with your C lab exercise than installing Visual Studio and getting lost in it. I dislike Visual Studio because to set things up you have to compare online screenshots to your settings and click around multiple tabs of configurations. In the end you (as beginner) don't know what libraries get included and if it will work on another computer. GNU tools are text-driven, so easier to replicate and to reason about.

pjmlp 6y ago
Depends where one is coming from, when I was TA at my university Visual Studio was the official C++ lab exercise tooling for first year students, in Win 9x with student drivers mounted on login. We did not do bare bones C already in those days.
Koshkin 6y ago
Command-line "build tools" are freely available for those who do not care about the IDE: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2019 https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-fo...
marcoperaza 6y ago
The GNU tools are not fully compatible with the Windows ABI and they don't support some important Windows features. There are great reasons to use the GNU tools, like compiling unix programs that do not otherwise target Windows. But you are swimming upstream if you use the GNU tools for general Windows development. Windows is a complex, integrated system that has evolved over a long period of time and is very different from unix-like operating systems. The peculiarities that exist in MSVC and associated tools are not just the whimsies of Microsoft devdiv engineers and product managers, but often tie in to operating system functionality. If you try to develop Windows applications with mingw, you will eventually hit weird problems and errors that simply would not exist if you used Microsoft's toolchain. If you want an alternative to Microsoft's compiler, then consider llvm, which is aiming for full ABI compatibility and even produces PDBs (though I'm skeptical that they're as complete as the ones generated by Microsoft's tools). But the compatibility is incomplete, so ymmv.
- danieldk 6y ago
  I wonder how long this stays true though. Microsoft seems to aim for deep integration of Linux in Windows per WSL. They even showcased that they are working on Wayland support for WSL, which would enable using Linux GUI applications directly on Windows. We may soon get at a point where Linux applications feel as native on Windows as native Windows applications (which use quite a variety of toolkits anyway), as the integration deepens. Now WSL still uses larger distribution images. But very little holds them from supporting thin Linux images with just the necessary dependencies that launches in Windows as any other application. Using LLVM for ABI compat is a good tip though!
  - qppo 6y ago
    WSL is more a solution for users that want to have Linux software on Windows. It's not a solution for developers that want to target Windows, which is what I take this thread to be about. I don't know if it will ever come with a vanilla Windows Home edition install but somehow I doubt that.
    - strmpnk 6y ago
      WSL is available on Home (including WSL2, you just don’t get access to all of hyper-v even if it’s running).
      - qppo 6y ago
        Sorry if I was unclear, I meant as in "installed by default" on a user's machine.
        danieldk 6y ago
        Not yet, but I think it is very likely that in the future installing a Linux distribution from the store will automatically install/enable WSL. Micro-distributions with a specific applications are only a small step from there. I don't see what they have to lose. Windows is still used widely in business. But their lock-in has drastically reduced with the rise of iOS, Android, and web apps. Making Windows more attractive as a platform for developers to deploy applications, even if it is through the WSL subsystem will make Windows as a platform more competitive to these other ecosystems. I am currently writing scientific software. But we have stopped building Windows versions, since these programs work great with WSL and it is far less effort than building these applications separately with Visual C++.
fsloth 6y ago
Sure, visual studio builds have been, and still are up to a point a bit miserable experience. But not as miserable as trying to use gnu tools for building C++ on windows. I have over a decade of exprience in that and it's always equally painfull. There were good reasons to use GNU tools when MSVC did not have thorough enough support for C++11 and GCC did. Now MSVC is pretty good with the latest C++ standard. Besides, Windows now comes with a real posix virtualized environment - Windows subsystem for Linux - which works great - use that, not msys2 or cygwin if you must have a gnu build system on a windows...
smittywerben 6y ago
I build using command line tools on Windows. It's great for my purposes. I don't think switching MSVC tools for GNU tools makes much of a difference.

pjmlp 6y ago

Depends where one is coming from, when I was TA at my university Visual Studio was the official C++ lab exercise tooling for first year students, in Win 9x with student drivers mounted on login. We did not do bare bones C already in those days.

Koshkin 6y ago

Command-line "build tools" are freely available for those who do not care about the IDE: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-for-visual-studio-2019 https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/#build-tools-fo...

marcoperaza 6y ago

The GNU tools are not fully compatible with the Windows ABI and they don't support some important Windows features. There are great reasons to use the GNU tools, like compiling unix programs that do not otherwise target Windows. But you are swimming upstream if you use the GNU tools for general Windows development. Windows is a complex, integrated system that has evolved over a long period of time and is very different from unix-like operating systems. The peculiarities that exist in MSVC and associated tools are not just the whimsies of Microsoft devdiv engineers and product managers, but often tie in to operating system functionality. If you try to develop Windows applications with mingw, you will eventually hit weird problems and errors that simply would not exist if you used Microsoft's toolchain. If you want an alternative to Microsoft's compiler, then consider llvm, which is aiming for full ABI compatibility and even produces PDBs (though I'm skeptical that they're as complete as the ones generated by Microsoft's tools). But the compatibility is incomplete, so ymmv.

danieldk 6y ago
I wonder how long this stays true though. Microsoft seems to aim for deep integration of Linux in Windows per WSL. They even showcased that they are working on Wayland support for WSL, which would enable using Linux GUI applications directly on Windows. We may soon get at a point where Linux applications feel as native on Windows as native Windows applications (which use quite a variety of toolkits anyway), as the integration deepens. Now WSL still uses larger distribution images. But very little holds them from supporting thin Linux images with just the necessary dependencies that launches in Windows as any other application. Using LLVM for ABI compat is a good tip though!
- qppo 6y ago
  WSL is more a solution for users that want to have Linux software on Windows. It's not a solution for developers that want to target Windows, which is what I take this thread to be about. I don't know if it will ever come with a vanilla Windows Home edition install but somehow I doubt that.
  - strmpnk 6y ago
    WSL is available on Home (including WSL2, you just don’t get access to all of hyper-v even if it’s running).
    - qppo 6y ago
      Sorry if I was unclear, I meant as in "installed by default" on a user's machine.
      - danieldk 6y ago
        Not yet, but I think it is very likely that in the future installing a Linux distribution from the store will automatically install/enable WSL. Micro-distributions with a specific applications are only a small step from there. I don't see what they have to lose. Windows is still used widely in business. But their lock-in has drastically reduced with the rise of iOS, Android, and web apps. Making Windows more attractive as a platform for developers to deploy applications, even if it is through the WSL subsystem will make Windows as a platform more competitive to these other ecosystems. I am currently writing scientific software. But we have stopped building Windows versions, since these programs work great with WSL and it is far less effort than building these applications separately with Visual C++.

fsloth 6y ago

Sure, visual studio builds have been, and still are up to a point a bit miserable experience. But not as miserable as trying to use gnu tools for building C++ on windows. I have over a decade of exprience in that and it's always equally painfull. There were good reasons to use GNU tools when MSVC did not have thorough enough support for C++11 and GCC did. Now MSVC is pretty good with the latest C++ standard. Besides, Windows now comes with a real posix virtualized environment - Windows subsystem for Linux - which works great - use that, not msys2 or cygwin if you must have a gnu build system on a windows...

smittywerben 6y ago

I build using command line tools on Windows. It's great for my purposes. I don't think switching MSVC tools for GNU tools makes much of a difference.