Átila on Code

I ran DOS on my first PC. The natural progession unfolded, with me then running Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows XP after that (Windows ME, like the Matrix sequels, was a collective bad dream that didn’t really happen). I used Borland’s IDE to write C code, then RHIDE with DJGPP since I couldn’t even imagine using a compiler from the command-line. I say that because I wasn’t “brought up” using *nix at all, and my only exposure was at university. These days however, I do nearly all of my development on Linux. Why? I find it to be a much, much better experience.

Somewhat unfortunately for me, my current job requires me to do Windows development. And every time I boot into Windows or have to fix Windows-specific problems, it makes me want to cry. Why? Let me name some of the reasons why.

Speed, or the lack thereof. I haven’t done a thorough scientific analysis on this, because I don’t think it’d be worth my while to do so. It seems clear to me that NTFS is very very slow. Doing anything on it, from running CMake to compiling to linking, seems to take forever. To the point that it makes me actively wonder how anyone manages to get anything done on Windows. I can rebuild the reference D compiler on my laptop in about 1.6s after modifying one file. On Windows the same build, on the same machine, takes ~1 minute. Given that I find 1.6s infuriatingly slow, you can imagine what sorts of dark swear words I reserve for waiting for a whole minute while what would have been considered a supercomputer a few years ago decides to go get anything done.

Dependencies. Unlike *nix, there is no standard path(s) to look up libraries. Granted, even different Linux distros use different conventions and paths from each other, but libraries are usually installed with a package manager anyway so mostly you don’t care.  And if you did, your linker would find them anyway without the need for extra flags. Need to link to, say, nanomsg on Windows? Good luck with that. Ah, but there’s vcpkg, I hear you say. Apparently Visual Studio auto-magically finds the libraries that vcpkg “installs”. Job done if you’re clicking a button in an IDE, not so much if you’re using a real build system running in CI. It _could_ be just as easy as adding a flag to your linker, but, alas, the .lib files don’t all end up in the same directory. vcpkg allows me to download libraries without having to write Powershell, but then actually linking is, for lack of a better word, “fun”. On Linux? pacman -S nanomsg; ninja

Batch files and/or powershell. I personally find bash horrible to write code in, but then I do Windows work and remember there’s worse. So much worse. Sigh.

Bash. I’ll explain. Git bash is amazing, I remember a time before that existed (I tried, unsucessfully, to compile bash from source for Windows with at least 3 different implementations back in the day). So why am I complaining? First of all, because I use zsh and haven’t seen an easy way to do that yet on Windows. Secondly, because building on Windows from the command-line often requires cmd.exe. Building C++ code? I’m not going to write my own bash version of vcvarsall.bat just to do that. Commands have a habit of spitting out error messages with backslashes (cos, duh, Windows), and good luck copying and pasting that into your bash shell.

Tooling. Want to create a zip? You’ll have to download and install a 3rd party tool. Oh, but the binary doesn’t get added to the PATH, so you’ll have to write out the full path in your batch file and pray one of your machines doesn’t install it to a different location.

Things are better than they used to be on Windows. We now have the Linux subsystem, git bash, and alternatives to the horrible built-in terminal emulator. To me, it just makes things less bad, and the moment I’m back on Arch Linux it feels like coming home from a not particularly good holiday.