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From: Paul <nospam@needed.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,alt.comp.os.windows-11
Subject: Re: Death By Auto-Immune Disease
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:57:12 -0400
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On Fri, 3/14/2025 5:25 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:39:16 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:
> 
>> On 3/13/25 17:54, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>
>>> Do you think maybe the entire Windows ecosystem is fundamentally
>>> hostile to open-source software?
>>
>> Otherwise, I have to compile from source with no guarantee that it
>> will work or integrate into the system as expected.
> 
> Building from source tends to be more reliable (and requires fewer steps) 
> on Linux than Windows. There is a guy on comp.lang.c, a Windows fanatic, 
> who regularly moans about this, as though it’s the fault of the developers 
> of Open Source.
> 
>> In this respect, Windows is much better since I only have to look for an
>> executable to load the software, and I can be sure that it will work.
> 
> That’s what Linux package repos do: they provide that “executable” (or 
> library dependency or whatever). Consider that a major distro like Debian 
> includes something like 50,000 packages in its official repo: where are 
> you going to find a selection of prebuilt open-source Windows executables 
> that large? It doesn’t exist.
> 

Visual studio hasn't always behaved like it does today.

Did you know you could use Visual Studio without a .proj file ?
I'm sure you know that, because you're ready to pass judgment on it.

There is a bat file that figures this stuff out for you, but I didn't
use that either. I did it all by hand, one try after another. Most
of the C language support trees, are in a separate Windows Kit (SDK).

cd /d  [set your working path] [Win10AMD on 4TB HDD]

set INCLUDE=C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.22621.0\ucrt;
            C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.42.34433\include;
            C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.22621.0\um;
            C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.22621.0\shared

set LIB=C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib\10.0.22621.0\ucrt\x64;
        C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib\10.0.22621.0\um\x64;
        C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.42.34433\lib\x64

set LIBPATH=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.42.34433\lib\x64

# compile and link. F:\TEMP for temporary files, the executable ends up under F:\

cl  parse-mft.cpp  /FoF:\TEMP\  /FeF:\parse-mft.exe

That's no different than MINGW. No moaning required.

A build recipe for Firefox, used the compiler and linker
directly from a VS install in this way. I didn't invent the
idea, but I knew it could be done, because I did a Firefox that way.

You don't have to use the IDE if you don't want to.

There were some earlier versions of VS, where setting
the path was easy. But they couldn't be satisfied with
that, and they had to make it much harder. Mission accomplished.
As a hobbyist, it would take me about a week of fiddling
around, before I could remember how to set one of these
up using the "GUI". It took less than a week, to make up some
paths for the job, the hard way.

FOSS trees with Win builds, are available on things like
github. You still have to use Safe Hex operating principles
and not be in a rush when doing things like that. You are not
always limited to just source tarballs, sometimes there are
executables.

I keep a MINGW tree (the original), and if the headers
I need aren't there, I have VS Community Edition installs I can use.

   Paul