Re: Microsoft woes

On Sun, 17 Mar 2024 08:02:40 +0000
Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> wrote:

Life goes on it's merry way independedent of Usenet and programming,
and I can now sleep at my own house once more, and I dusted off a
Windows machine which had been laid up for four years. And of course
I wanted to simply compile the flood fill code and run some quick
tests.
 
And what a nightmare. The whole evening getting the machine back in
the land of the living. What should be routine - compile an ANSI C
program which calls the standard library, is just not made routine.
3GB of components had to be downloaded, and a runtime library
obtained and downloaded specially. Then the project setting need
fiddling with in unexpected and not very obvious ways.
 

It's much easier if you don't insist on using Visual Studio GUI.
cl.exe is still the same cl.exe with the same options.
Downloads are nonsensically huge, that's true. But that was already
true four years ago.

Utter, utter unacceptable chaos and difficulty and hurdles.
Considering that 4 years ago it was set up to compile a C program.

What prevented you from using existing setup?