4 ms·

You're thinking in the wrong direction. WINE can let Linux users run Windows binaries, but then as a programmer you need to write Windows-y C. What makes this a

You're thinking in the wrong direction. WINE can let Linux users run Windows binaries, but then as a programmer you need to write Windows-y C. What makes this appealing to me is that as a Windows user I can write UNIX-y C and it will just work. Obviously Windows could also be supported by recompiling under Cygwin, or MSYS2, but those tools are challenging. Compiling code designed for a UNIX on Windows is a pain in the ass, and sometimes the end result has strange behaviors. Upstream projects tend not to care much about Windows support, so trying to fix it you're on your own. Nowadays we have WSL so we can just run Linux binaries on Windows as-is, but that's still a fairly heavyweight solution. Wouldn't it be better to just compile once on UNIX, link to a magical portability library, and now you have a binary that just works everywhere? I think so.

jancsika 6y ago
> Obviously Windows could also be supported by recompiling under Cygwin, or MSYS2 MSYS2 is a dream. You install it, specify your dependencies using Arch's pacman, and go to town. No fiddling with Windows configuration files or paths, it just works. In fact it has been easier to get new devs up and running in that environment than in Linux, where they tended to smear build-time dependencies across the bare metal install. Of course there are solutions for that, but those solutions are more of a pain to set up than MSYS2.
- 1996 6y ago
  I'd like to see an MSYS2 compiled with cosmopolitan
  - alisonatwork 6y ago
    The cool thing is that it wouldn't really be MSYS2. It would just be coreutils, or binutils. The dream is that a programmer can just write their tool, using standard ISO C, maybe some POSIX, then compile and link it to Cosmopolitan and they're done. No need to set up any special configs or ifdefs. No need for any platform specific distributions. You just compile once and now you have the canonical version.

jancsika 6y ago

> Obviously Windows could also be supported by recompiling under Cygwin, or MSYS2 MSYS2 is a dream. You install it, specify your dependencies using Arch's pacman, and go to town. No fiddling with Windows configuration files or paths, it just works. In fact it has been easier to get new devs up and running in that environment than in Linux, where they tended to smear build-time dependencies across the bare metal install. Of course there are solutions for that, but those solutions are more of a pain to set up than MSYS2.

1996 6y ago
I'd like to see an MSYS2 compiled with cosmopolitan
- alisonatwork 6y ago
  The cool thing is that it wouldn't really be MSYS2. It would just be coreutils, or binutils. The dream is that a programmer can just write their tool, using standard ISO C, maybe some POSIX, then compile and link it to Cosmopolitan and they're done. No need to set up any special configs or ifdefs. No need for any platform specific distributions. You just compile once and now you have the canonical version.