I’ve spent quite a lot of time dealing with code that will ever run on Linux which did not in fact only ever run on Linux!
Obviously for hobby projects anyone can do what they want. But adult projects should support Windows imho and consider Windows support from the start. Cross-platform is super easy unless you choose to make it hard.
Hope whatever "adult" is working on the project this is getting paid handsomely. They'd certainly need to pay me big bucks to care about Windows support.
In any case, Linux system call ABI is becoming a lingua franca of systems programming. BSDs have implemented Linux system calls. Windows has straight up included Linux in the system. It looks like simply targeting Linux can easily result in a binary that actually does run anywhere.
It's also possible to use Linux KMS/DRM without any user space libraries.
https://github.com/laxyyza/drmlist/
The problem with hardware accelerated rendering is much of the associated functionality is actually implemented in user space and therefore not part of the kernel. They unfortunately force the libc on us. One would have to reimplement things like Mesa in order to do this. Not impossible, just incredibly time consuming.
Things could have been organized in a way that makes this feasible. Example: SQLite. You can plug in your own memory allocation functions and VFS layer. I've been slowly porting the SQLite Unix VFS to freestanding Linux in order to use it in my freestanding applications.
Kind of. But not really. WSL2 is a thing. But most code isn’t running in WSL2 so if your thing “runs on windows” but requires running in a WSL2 context then oftentimes it might as well not exist.
> They'd certainly need to pay me big bucks to care about Windows support.
The great irony is that Windows is a much much much better and more pleasant dev environment. Linux is utterly miserable and it’s all modern programmers know. :(
And no WSL2 is not a newer version of WSL1, they are entirely different products.
I don’t know why Linux people are so adamant to break their backs - and the backs of everyone around them - to try and do things TheLinuxWay. It’s weird. IMHo it’s far far far better and to take a “when in Rome” approach.
My experience is that Linux people are MUCH worse at refusing to take a When in Rome approach than the other way. The great tragedy is that the Linux way is not always the best way.
> to try and do things TheLinuxWay
It's not really about TheLinuxWay. It's more that Microsoft completely lacks POSIX tools at all and the compiler needs to have a complete IDE installed, which I would need a license for, and the compiler invocation also doesn't really correspond to any other compiler.
True!
> compiler needs to have a complete IDE installed
Not true. You can download just MSVC the toolchain sans IDE. Works great. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76792904/how-to-install-...
> compiler invocation also doesn't really correspond to any other compiler
True. But you don’t have to use MSVC. You can just use Clang for everything.
Clang on Windows does typically use the Microsoft C++ standard library implementation. But that’s totally fine and won’t impact your invocation.
MinGW is the open-source implementation of the Windows API, so that you can use the Microsoft C++ standard library, without needing to use the MS toolchain.
If you started with a native Windows-only project you would never use MinGW. Probably 0.01% of Windows projects use GCC.
Over the years I have come to associate “project uses MinGW” with “this probably take two days of my life to get running and I’m just going to hit hurdle after hurdle after hurdle”.
The whole Linux concept of a “dev environment” is kind of really bad and broken and is why everyone uses Docker or Linux or one of a dozen different mutually incompatible environments.
The actually correct thing to do is for projects to include their fucking dependencies so they JustWork without jumping through all these hoops.
How is the standalone MS build system called?
Probably a server that is only ever run by a single company on a single CPU type. That company will have complete control of the OS stack, so if it says no Windows, then no Windows has to be supported.