> 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?