I've used Windows many times the last 20 years and i'd rather use MSYS2 to build a C/C++ program than MSVC as it allows me to use the exact same tools i'd prefe

I've used Windows many times the last 20 years and i'd rather use MSYS2 to build a C/C++ program than MSVC as it allows me to use the exact same tools i'd prefer to use on Linux and macOS (...i don't really prefer to use macOS, but i can still use the same tools there too) than having Windows be its own special snowflake. And i find current MSVC incredibly bloated. I see in other comments you mentioned Powershell and CMake and TBH these are two things i avoided whenever i used Windows. CMake is used too much to be able to avoid it on Linux (which is currently my main OS) but it is not a tool i'd use myself if i had the choice. If i had to use a tool that generates build files, i'd rather use premake[0] as it is a self-contained binary with very simple Lua-based scripts (by default they look declarative but you can extend it as much as you want - i've even used a script to generate CMake files since these can be parsed by Qt Creator). The only downside is that on Unix systems it doesn't know concept of a shared library (can be "taught" with a custom script but it isn't something that is available out of the box). [0] https://premake.github.io/ https://premake.github.io/