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I fixed Windows native development

marler8997.github.io

41–50 of 406 posts

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#41
post #16

At the risk of being that guy , I haven't had any issues onboarding people onto native projects written in Rust. rustup does a great job of fetching the required toolchains without issue. I'd imagine the same is also true of Go or Zig.

I'm pretty people who write and build C++ on Windows do it for good reasons, often reasons that are out of their control. Your comment is not going to make any difference.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#42
I was just setting up a new machine and was setting up the Rust environment. The very first thing rustup-init asked was to install Visual Studio before proceeding. It was like 20-30gb of stuff installed before moving forward.

This tool would be a great help if I knew beforehand.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#43
post #33
post #6

It starts by not looking into Windows through UNIX developer glasses. The only issue currently plaguing Windows development is the mess with WinUI and WinAppSDK since Project Reunion, however they are relatively easy to ignore.

>It starts by not looking into Windows through UNIX developer glasses. People don't need any UNIX biases to just want multiple versions of MSVS to work the way Microsoft advertises. For example, with every new version of Visual Studio, Microsoft always says you can install it side-by-side with an older version. But every time, the new version of VS has a bug in the install somewhere that changes something that breaks…

Note that this also doesn't work on Linux - your system's package manager probably has no idea how to install and handle having multiple versions of packages and headers.

That's why docker build environments are a thing - even on Windows.

Build scripts are complex, and even though I'm pretty sure VS offers pretty good support for having multiple SDK versions at the same time (that I've used), it only takes a single script that wasn't written with versioning in mind, to break the whole build.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#44
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clang is the better alternative to MinGW because it can use standard Windows libraries and avoids the need for additional runtime.

Just msys2 it all

MSYS2 is horrible. It brings a massive runtime environment and is a bad idea to foist on users.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#45
post #38
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can install the LTSC toolchain without a license. Just not the IDE.

That's not correct. You don't have to give your credit card details or even be logged in but you are still required to have any Visual Studio license. For hobbyists and startups the VS Community license is enough but larger companies need a VS Professional license even for the VS Build Tools. How strict Microsoft is with enforcement of this license is another story.

[flagged]

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#46

I'm just asking, but is there really a need for a native programs anymore? Where I worked a decade ago, we started porting all our native programs over to the browser and this was when MVC beta was just being released. At this point with Electron and Tauri, is there even a need to write a native program Now with AI, I would think that porting a native program to the browser wouldn't be the chore it once was.

I use COM and DLLs to extend software/automate. Using Visual Studio gives me some really nice debugging options.

I did try using python and js but the variable explorer is garbage due to 'late binding'.

I thought this was just my ignorance, but I've asked experts, AI, and google searched and they unfortunately agree. That said, some people have created their own log/prints so they don't need to deal with it.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#47
While this is great - Visual Studio installer has a set of "command-line parameters" for unattended installs.

You can then build a script/documentation that isolates your specific requirements and workloads:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/use-c...

Had to do this back in 2018, because I worked with a client with no direct internet access on it's DEV/build machines (and even when there was connectivity it was over traditional slow/low-latency satellite connections), so part of the process was also to build an offline install package.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#50
post #28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exacly.. I avoid Visual Studio.. I try to build everthing using Mingw..

Clang is the better alternative to MinGW because it can use standard Windows libraries and avoids the need for additional runtime.

Can you actually do cross compilation (on Linux host to win64 binary) with clang in the same way as MingW does out of the box though?
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