[GNC-dev] Building on Windows

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On Aug 27, 2019 w35d239, at 11:01 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
> 
> VSCode can't build anything, it's just an editor. But it can call[1] out to the build system to do whatever build for whatever platform you like. Visual Studio is the full-featured IDE and there's a free (as in beer, Microsoft hasn't gotten *that* far down the open source road!) version [2]. There's even a Mac version[3] that's probably better than Xcode, though admittedly that's not saying much.

And probably why it is seemingly used primarily for web based development so far.

> 
> I don't know much about WSL, I was wondering out loud.

WSL was not-so-allegedly created so devs can stick with the MS desktop and develop for Linux on it. (primarily) It runs (as of v2) a real Linux kernel in a Win10 managed ‘utility’ VM with very little overhead or performance hit. The code executed is ‘Linux’ code. Some potential uses are to run Linux apps ‘on’ Windows desktops with a native feel and performance. (supposedly WSL2 will achieve that)

It stems some bleeding of devs away from the MS platform, but also makes it easier for MS devs to work on the Linux kernel which they have started contributing to. (probably for WSL, a bit circular) Note, that sentence is pure conjecture from the interwebs.

There is some evidence for this with the new VSCode Remote which is an extension where you run VSCode on windows, but ‘remote into’ WSL: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/wsl (making it easy to stick with Windows, but still develop for Linux)

Regards,
Adrien