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I fixed Windows native development

marler8997.github.io

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Re: I fixed Windows native development

#51

Post by skissane »

torginus wrote: post #43
jasode wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 s…

> 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.

But this isn’t true. Many distros package major versions of GCC/LLVM as separate packages, so you install and use more than one version in parallel, no Docker/etc required

It can indeed be true for some things-such as the C library-but often not for the compilers

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#52

Post by ivanjermakov »

One day I decided to port my text editor to Windows. Since it depends on pcre2 and treesitter, these two libraries had to be provided by the system.

In the span of ~2hrs I didn't manage to find a way to please Zig compiler to notice "system" libraries to link against.

Perhaps I'm too spoiled by installing a system wide dependency in a single command. Or Windows took a wrong turn a couple of decades ago and is very hostile to both developers and regular users.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#53

Post by Uvix »

g947o wrote: post #35

* Is this allowed per VS' ToS? * I wonder if Microsoft intentionally doesn't provide this first party to force everyone to install VS, especially the professional/enterprise versions. One could imagine that we'd have a vsproject.toml file similar to pyproject.toml that just does everything when combined with a minimal command line tool. But that doesn't exist for some reason.

Visual Studio does have that functionality, via vsconfig files: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/impor...

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#54

Post by g947o »

Uvix wrote: post #53
g947o wrote: post #35

* Is this allowed per VS' ToS? * I wonder if Microsoft intentionally doesn't provide this first party to force everyone to install VS, especially the professional/enterprise versions. One could imagine that we'd have a vsproject.toml file similar to pyproject.toml that just does everything when combined with a minimal command line tool. But that doesn't exist for some reason.

Visual Studio does have that functionality, via vsconfig files: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/impor...

Doesn't look like it's versioned, or installs Visual Studio itself.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#55

Post by okanat »

dgxyz wrote: post #45
foepys wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Well, let's say this is the world view of all companies about open-source software. Then what happens. If people "tend to not give crap" about licenses, all the nice guarantees of GPL etc also disappear.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#57

Post by BearOso »

g947o wrote: post #35

* Is this allowed per VS' ToS? * I wonder if Microsoft intentionally doesn't provide this first party to force everyone to install VS, especially the professional/enterprise versions. One could imagine that we'd have a vsproject.toml file similar to pyproject.toml that just does everything when combined with a minimal command line tool. But that doesn't exist for some reason.

Microsoft doesn't seem to care unless you're a company. That's the reason community edition is free. Individual licenses would be pennies to them, and they gain more than that by having a new person making things in their ecosystem. It's in their interest to make their platform accessible as possible.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#58

Post by evanjrowley »

its_notjack wrote: post #34

Is this post AI-written? The repeated lists with highlighted key points, the "it's not just [x], but [y]" and "no [a] just [b]" scream LLM to me. It would be good to know how much of this post and this project was human-built.

Perhaps people have mimicked the style because LLMs have popularized it and clearly it serves some benefit to readers.

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#59

Post by esseph »

its_notjack wrote: post #34

Is this post AI-written? The repeated lists with highlighted key points, the "it's not just [x], but [y]" and "no [a] just [b]" scream LLM to me. It would be good to know how much of this post and this project was human-built.

> Is this post AI-written?

What if it was?

What if it wasn't?

What if you never find out definitely?

Do you wonder that about all content?

If so, doesn't that get exhausting?

Re: I fixed Windows native development

#60

Post by well_ackshually »

thrownaway561 wrote: post #39

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.

> is there really a need for a native programs anymore

As long as you don't give a shit about the fact that your baseline memory consumption is now 500MB instead of 25MB, and that 80% of your CPU time is wasted on running javascript through a JIT and rendering HTML instead of doing logic, no.

If you don't give a shit about your users or their time, there's indeed no longer a need to write native programs.

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