On Sat, 8 Mar 2025 14:09:17 +0000I've just typed 'make' in a Windows prompt. Nothing happens ('command not recognised'). That's a good start!
bart <bc@freeuk.com> gabbled:My idea is similar to supplying binaries, but replacing each binary file with one C source file. This now needs a C compiler to turn into a binary, but nothing else. No configure, no makefiles, virtually no special options, no special compiler needed and no special version.So instead of just typing "make" the user has to know how to invoke the
compiler, possibly with certain switches set. Not sure how thats any better.
If I look at my gcc binaries, there's a program called 'mingw32-make.exe'. Maybe that's the one. However, build instructions call for 'make' so it will immediately fail.
What Make does is take a mountain of complexity called a 'makefile', which is special kind of arcane language, and tries to run it. It might work, it might fail immediately, or it might grind away for several minutes and then it stops.
Why I am aiming for is to be able to just type:
gcc prog.c
But apparently that won't do. Some smart-arses will point out that that's more typing than 'make'. Others, less smart, don't actually know how to directly invoke a compiler like this.
Now, it's been a while since I've argued about makefiles and all their woes. But maybe things have changed. If I copy that file above to 'make.exe', and navigate to a folder full of Lua source files, I see it also has this:
c:\luac>dir make*
02/02/2024 13:18 7,722 Makefile
So according to you, this should be a piece of piss. OK, I'll try it:
c:\luac>make
makefile:103: target 'AIX' given more than once in the same rule
makefile:117: target 'FreeBSD' given more than once in the same rule
Guessing `uname`
make[1]: Entering directory 'c:/luac'
makefile:103: target 'AIX' given more than once in the same rule
makefile:117: target 'FreeBSD' given more than once in the same rule
make[1]: *** No rule to make target '`uname`'. Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory 'c:/luac'
make: *** [makefile:101: guess] Error 2
That went well! Maybe this is the wrong one, and I've been messing about with these files. So I download a fresh Lua versiom as a .tar.gz file and install it. Yes, there were in fact two makefiles, one in a higher directory level:
c:\ll\lua-5.4.7>dir
13/06/2024 22:16 <DIR> .
08/03/2025 16:15 <DIR> ..
13/06/2024 22:16 <DIR> doc
08/05/2024 21:47 3,150 Makefile
13/06/2024 22:16 151 README
13/06/2024 22:15 <DIR> src
I now follow the instructions from here: https://www.lua.org/download.html and do this:
c:\ll\lua-5.4.7>make all test
make[1]: Entering directory 'c:/ll/lua-5.4.7/src'
makefile:101: target 'AIX' given more than once in the same rule
makefile:115: target 'FreeBSD' given more than once in the same rule
.....
make[2]: Leaving directory 'c:/ll/lua-5.4.7/src'
make[1]: *** [makefile:99: guess] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory 'c:/ll/lua-5.4.7/src'
make: *** [makefile:55: guess] Error 2
Oh dear, that hasn't worked either. So now what? Maybe forget all that, and just for a prebuilt binary here: https://github.com/rjpcomputing/luaforwindows/releases. However, that's an old 5.1 version.
Or I could just build Lua the easy way:
c:\ll\lua-5.4.7\src>del luac.c
c:\ll\lua-5.4.7\src>gcc *.c -o lua
c:\ll\lua-5.4.7\src>lua
Lua 5.4.7 Copyright (C) 1994-2024 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
>
This works! No crappy makefiles needed. Here I happened to know it involves compiling 33 of the 34 C files supplied (luac.c is for embedded I think).
The makefiles are full of useless dependency info. Lua is a small program, and I just want to use it, not develop it. So it only needs to be built once, and the makefile then could then be ultra-simple; it might even work!
In any case, tcc builds it in 1/4 of a second.
The problem is not with Windows!True. I've done a small amount of C/C++ dev on Windows but these days I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole and rubber gloves.which has a load of ifdefs in the code itself and the user doesn'thave todo anything except pick the correct makefile or for windows projectfile.
>
I suspect you either haven't done much building of open source software on Windows, or were remarkably lucky.
The real problem is that you are so over-reliant on all the variety of tools within your Linux eco-system, that you are lost in an environment where that doesn't exist.
I find it easy to develop on Windows because I have few dependencies, and I would find it easy to develop on Linux - if I had to. (However it has some annoying things would drive me up the wall.)
| Date | Sujet | # | Auteur | |
| 28 Mar 26 |  … |
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