7 ms·

Microsoft, please port Visual studio to OS X.

by npalli 12y ago

BinaryIdiot 12y ago
That would be amazing. I feel like that may be part of their end goal but it would take quite some time before it happens. Visual Studio, like Eclipse, is really heavy but it's difficult to find an IDE that's better.
edgyswingset 12y ago
I suspect it's in the works. I don't know how reliant it is on Win32 APIs (probably awfully reliant), but some work to isolate those calls and attempt to bring POSIX into the fold could certainly be possible. I guess it's really a matter of getting developers on Mac to buy into using Visual Studio, which could be a challenge.
sspiff 12y ago
And Linux, really.
myko 12y ago
Does VS support C99 yet? While we're making requests I'd like that to get on the list.
- plorkyeran 12y ago
  Yes, 2013 added support for most of it and 2015 adds a few more things.
  - StephanTLavavej 12y ago
    Specifically, in 2015 our C99 Standard Library implementation is complete, except for tgmath.h (irrelevant in C++) and the CX_LIMITED_RANGE/FP_CONTRACT pragma macros.
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Back when I first had the shock of discovering that VS only supported C89 I remember poking around to figure out why and finding a rant from a higher-up on the compiler team along the lines of "C is a dead language, just use C++." What happened? Did he leave? Did an order come down from on high? Did he mellow with age?
      - Hobotron1 12y ago
        Doesn't the latest C++ standard more or less include C99?
        plorkyeran 12y ago
        Only the C99 standard library. The language changes which weren't already part of C++ weren't imported.
      - Scorponok 12y ago
        I believe the choice was to spend time on adding C99 support, vs spending more time on C++ support. C++ had more people asking for it, so it got priority over C99.
      - spongo2 12y ago
        Our current statement of support is that we support enough of C99 to unblock commonly used libraries. We support a large swath of C99 but it is correct that our support isn't complete yet as we prioritized C++ conformance. If there is a C99 library that you need to use that we don't work with, please let me know. (I'm the VC++ dev manager)
        comex 12y ago
        It seems that MSVC really has improved its support for C99, though, and I'm glad about that. What about C11? Does it support _Atomic/stdatomic.h? I can't tell from Googling, and I'm too tired to install the CTP tonight... If it does, it'd be ahead of OS X, hopefully not for long. The C11/C++11 memory model is powerful, way nicer to use than volatile plus OS-specific library functions, and, compared to other features, it's difficult to properly implement as a shim. It's too bad that only C++ can take advantage of it on some platforms. Existing libraries are one thing, but when writing new code (and yes, I want to write new code in C), one of the big three compilers not supporting a feature is strong motivation not to use it... even if it would be really nice to have. Maybe in the coming years Clang will improve its Windows support enough that I can just tell everyone to swap it in for cl.exe, so I won't have to care about MSVC's standards support, but for now it and GCC are missing a lot of features on Windows.
- DominikD 12y ago
  It does if you compile with Clang - VS is just a front-end after all. If you're asking about MSVC however, it's incomplete.
yeureka 12y ago
That would be amazing. Using XCode is very frustrating. I don't understand how Apple can actually write their software using XCode. No support for bookmarks. Very bad find/replace usability. Scrolling text is painful even on my brand new top of the range MBP. Sometimes I have to switch to Sublime for some editing tasks that are too painful in XCode.
- Zergy 12y ago
  I've started using AppCode for actually writing code and just using XCode for the interface builder. Trying to transition from IntelliJ to XCode was very painful.
reitzensteinm 12y ago
The thought of porting a decades old, 50 million line code base from windows to Unix, one that was deemed too complex to retrofit 64 bit support, makes me put my own insignificant development hassles of the past few days in perspective. No matter how bad it seems, at least I'm not on that team.
- revelation 12y ago
  I recently had this very same realization after opening some crusty PPTX on Android and seeing those awful animations. The poor soul that had to port that stuff..
  - akoeplinger 12y ago
    There's a pretty interesting video of how the Office team uses C++ for their cross-platform efforts from CppCon 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4
  - api 12y ago
    "Welcome to hell. Here's your 15 year old MSC code base to port to OS X." You couldn't pay me enough... not because I wouldn't want a fat salary, but because I literally do not think I could actually bring myself to do it. It would require drugs.
    - rbanffy 12y ago
      You could still take the fat salary until they found out it's not working (because, of course, it cannot possibly work). If they decided the code base is too crufty (instead of deeming you incompetent) you could still keep the fat salary and land in another realm of the company. Unfortunately for you, the odds of them deciding the codebase is too crufty (and, therefore, that the very senior exec sitting on it managed its aging poorly) are not good.
  - kabdib 12y ago
    I worked with an ex-Microsoftie who was responsible for getting Excel onto the Mac, in the 1990s. He quit and swore off computers for a couple of years, and we had to convince him that (a) we were a great company and he should definitely interview with us, and (b) we weren't going to treat him the way Microsoft had. He was pretty good, but there were parts of his psyche that seemed . . . damaged.
sz4kerto 12y ago
Visual Studio is way more than what one sees at the first look. Huge part (and value) of it is the probably unparalleled debugging/profiling capabilities. That are very much Windows specific, porting them to OSX/Linux means writing a lot of new code, not just taking the old stuff and adapting it.
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  Their first steps I would think would be allowing support for other compilers in Windows like GCC and Clang maybe? But again all this is every programmers pipe dream for now...
  - corysama 12y ago
    I'm guessing this is just for mobile, but you might be interesting in this pic from the article https://i3-vso.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC794253.jpg https://i3-vso.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC794253.jpg Also, a quick google turned up this: http://www.ishani.org/projects/ClangVSX/ http://www.ishani.org/projects/ClangVSX/
  - cwyers 12y ago
    GCC is pretty much written such that non-GPLed code cannot interact with it. You could use it as a compiler, I guess, but Intellisense and such wouldn't work with GCC.
tacos 12y ago
Visual Studio in even the shittiest, crufty Windows VM is a better experience than Xcode. Seriously Apple, what is the deal?
- pmelendez 12y ago
  Shocking enough I have a couple of friends that love XCode... I guess there is room for everybody (Although I can't stand XCode either)
  - eclipxe 12y ago
    I love XCode, used VS for many many years and wouldn't go back. I love IntelliJ also, but XCode is a close second
  - TwoBit 12y ago
    There are so many things Xcode does worse than Visual Studio, and so few things it does better. 5:1 ratio. Yesterday I was dealing with how Xcode's disassembly mode debugging is so bad compared to VS that it's nearly unusable.
- coliveira 12y ago
  I don't see why people complain so much about Xcode. I haven't used VS for a few years now, but I have bad memories of it. Xcode is in my opinion excellent compared to Visual Studio (especially for C/C++ work).
- bernadus_edwin 12y ago
  Which xcode? Objective-c or swift? Swift xcode is not really good. Sometime i have to clean cache folder when xcode intelisense is not working
JustSomeNobody 12y ago
Microsoft, please don't. Instead, write a version of V.S. specifically for OS X.
api 12y ago
... and Linux, for that matter. They could pwn the IDE space.
VOYD 12y ago
never say never.
shanselman 12y ago
The WHOLE THING? Do you really want that?
- bernadus_edwin 12y ago
  Dont, please dont. Save people resource to focus on visual studio windows. Maybe the better solution is use different approach, send minor team to assist xamarin fixing xamarin studio fixbug
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

Microsoft, please port Visual studio to OS X.

by npalli 12y ago

Microsoft, please port Visual studio to OS X.

That would be amazing. I feel like that may be part of their end goal but it would take quite some time before it happens. Visual Studio, like Eclipse, is really heavy but it's difficult to find an IDE that's better.

edgyswingset 12y ago

I suspect it's in the works. I don't know how reliant it is on Win32 APIs (probably awfully reliant), but some work to isolate those calls and attempt to bring POSIX into the fold could certainly be possible. I guess it's really a matter of getting developers on Mac to buy into using Visual Studio, which could be a challenge.

sspiff 12y ago

And Linux, really.

myko 12y ago

Does VS support C99 yet? While we're making requests I'd like that to get on the list.

plorkyeran 12y ago
Yes, 2013 added support for most of it and 2015 adds a few more things.
- StephanTLavavej 12y ago
  Specifically, in 2015 our C99 Standard Library implementation is complete, except for tgmath.h (irrelevant in C++) and the CX_LIMITED_RANGE/FP_CONTRACT pragma macros.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Back when I first had the shock of discovering that VS only supported C89 I remember poking around to figure out why and finding a rant from a higher-up on the compiler team along the lines of "C is a dead language, just use C++." What happened? Did he leave? Did an order come down from on high? Did he mellow with age?
    - Hobotron1 12y ago
      Doesn't the latest C++ standard more or less include C99?
      - plorkyeran 12y ago
        Only the C99 standard library. The language changes which weren't already part of C++ weren't imported.
    - Scorponok 12y ago
      I believe the choice was to spend time on adding C99 support, vs spending more time on C++ support. C++ had more people asking for it, so it got priority over C99.
    - spongo2 12y ago
      Our current statement of support is that we support enough of C99 to unblock commonly used libraries. We support a large swath of C99 but it is correct that our support isn't complete yet as we prioritized C++ conformance. If there is a C99 library that you need to use that we don't work with, please let me know. (I'm the VC++ dev manager)
      - comex 12y ago
        It seems that MSVC really has improved its support for C99, though, and I'm glad about that. What about C11? Does it support _Atomic/stdatomic.h? I can't tell from Googling, and I'm too tired to install the CTP tonight... If it does, it'd be ahead of OS X, hopefully not for long. The C11/C++11 memory model is powerful, way nicer to use than volatile plus OS-specific library functions, and, compared to other features, it's difficult to properly implement as a shim. It's too bad that only C++ can take advantage of it on some platforms. Existing libraries are one thing, but when writing new code (and yes, I want to write new code in C), one of the big three compilers not supporting a feature is strong motivation not to use it... even if it would be really nice to have. Maybe in the coming years Clang will improve its Windows support enough that I can just tell everyone to swap it in for cl.exe, so I won't have to care about MSVC's standards support, but for now it and GCC are missing a lot of features on Windows.
DominikD 12y ago
It does if you compile with Clang - VS is just a front-end after all. If you're asking about MSVC however, it's incomplete.

yeureka 12y ago

That would be amazing. Using XCode is very frustrating. I don't understand how Apple can actually write their software using XCode. No support for bookmarks. Very bad find/replace usability. Scrolling text is painful even on my brand new top of the range MBP. Sometimes I have to switch to Sublime for some editing tasks that are too painful in XCode.

Zergy 12y ago
I've started using AppCode for actually writing code and just using XCode for the interface builder. Trying to transition from IntelliJ to XCode was very painful.

reitzensteinm 12y ago

The thought of porting a decades old, 50 million line code base from windows to Unix, one that was deemed too complex to retrofit 64 bit support, makes me put my own insignificant development hassles of the past few days in perspective. No matter how bad it seems, at least I'm not on that team.

revelation 12y ago
I recently had this very same realization after opening some crusty PPTX on Android and seeing those awful animations. The poor soul that had to port that stuff..
- akoeplinger 12y ago
  There's a pretty interesting video of how the Office team uses C++ for their cross-platform efforts from CppCon 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4
- api 12y ago
  "Welcome to hell. Here's your 15 year old MSC code base to port to OS X." You couldn't pay me enough... not because I wouldn't want a fat salary, but because I literally do not think I could actually bring myself to do it. It would require drugs.
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    You could still take the fat salary until they found out it's not working (because, of course, it cannot possibly work). If they decided the code base is too crufty (instead of deeming you incompetent) you could still keep the fat salary and land in another realm of the company. Unfortunately for you, the odds of them deciding the codebase is too crufty (and, therefore, that the very senior exec sitting on it managed its aging poorly) are not good.
- kabdib 12y ago
  I worked with an ex-Microsoftie who was responsible for getting Excel onto the Mac, in the 1990s. He quit and swore off computers for a couple of years, and we had to convince him that (a) we were a great company and he should definitely interview with us, and (b) we weren't going to treat him the way Microsoft had. He was pretty good, but there were parts of his psyche that seemed . . . damaged.

sz4kerto 12y ago

Visual Studio is way more than what one sees at the first look. Huge part (and value) of it is the probably unparalleled debugging/profiling capabilities. That are very much Windows specific, porting them to OSX/Linux means writing a lot of new code, not just taking the old stuff and adapting it.

giancarlostoro 12y ago
Their first steps I would think would be allowing support for other compilers in Windows like GCC and Clang maybe? But again all this is every programmers pipe dream for now...
- corysama 12y ago
  I'm guessing this is just for mobile, but you might be interesting in this pic from the article https://i3-vso.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC794253.jpg https://i3-vso.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC794253.jpg Also, a quick google turned up this: http://www.ishani.org/projects/ClangVSX/ http://www.ishani.org/projects/ClangVSX/
- cwyers 12y ago
  GCC is pretty much written such that non-GPLed code cannot interact with it. You could use it as a compiler, I guess, but Intellisense and such wouldn't work with GCC.

tacos 12y ago

Visual Studio in even the shittiest, crufty Windows VM is a better experience than Xcode. Seriously Apple, what is the deal?

pmelendez 12y ago
Shocking enough I have a couple of friends that love XCode... I guess there is room for everybody (Although I can't stand XCode either)
- eclipxe 12y ago
  I love XCode, used VS for many many years and wouldn't go back. I love IntelliJ also, but XCode is a close second
- TwoBit 12y ago
  There are so many things Xcode does worse than Visual Studio, and so few things it does better. 5:1 ratio. Yesterday I was dealing with how Xcode's disassembly mode debugging is so bad compared to VS that it's nearly unusable.
coliveira 12y ago
I don't see why people complain so much about Xcode. I haven't used VS for a few years now, but I have bad memories of it. Xcode is in my opinion excellent compared to Visual Studio (especially for C/C++ work).
bernadus_edwin 12y ago
Which xcode? Objective-c or swift? Swift xcode is not really good. Sometime i have to clean cache folder when xcode intelisense is not working

JustSomeNobody 12y ago

Microsoft, please don't. Instead, write a version of V.S. specifically for OS X.

api 12y ago

... and Linux, for that matter. They could pwn the IDE space.

VOYD 12y ago

never say never.

shanselman 12y ago

The WHOLE THING? Do you really want that?

bernadus_edwin 12y ago
Dont, please dont. Save people resource to focus on visual studio windows. Maybe the better solution is use different approach, send minor team to assist xamarin fixing xamarin studio fixbug

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]