Getting C++ Hello World working on Windows (a comedy & tragedy)

8 months ago (sdegutis.github.io)

This is so true. I have MinGW, WSL, MSYS, Clang, VSCode, and VS. I have to juggle between them. I also hate VS, it does way too much for you and you get a bunch of garbage IDE files. I imagine MS engineers in every meeting: "should we make this simple? Nah, let's just add several layers of unnecessary bullshit, yeah that sounds good."

I have 3 envs on my Windows work laptop

1. PellesC => small C+win32 hobby

2. Msys2+mingw64 => main env for rust too

3. Clang-LLVM + Windows SDK + Cmake + jom (and Windows CRT from C3 install) => Works fine https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/download/llvmo...

(I use 3 for D too)

4. I would like to add to your guide compiling with OpenWatcom V2 (https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2)

5. Cygwin they have latest GCC 15 in testing

6. Winlibs or equation.com mingw distros

In other words I'm very lost and in over my head.

  • see above.

    would you like a guide for windows with method 3?

    methods 2/4 should work out of the box

    still I recommend you to give a go to latest D (dmd or ldc2) with method 3

    (2 may work too)

    • I'm nervous about mingw or msys2 partly because I don't know if windows will look native or unixy (I want native dark mode title bars), partly because I already have Git for Windows installed which comes with bash and a bunch of other unix utilities so I don't want to install doubles of any of those, and partly because I'm just too tired to do the uninstall dance all over again with yet another potential setup.

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