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It took me 3 months to install MinGW, and configure Eclipse on my Windows computer
It also took less than 10 minutes to do the same thing by installing VS Code, and add 2 plugins for me to run C/C++ on my Mac Mini.
Not saying Windows or Mac is better but...are you kidding me?
Edit: Maybe the same thing would have been possible with VS Code on Windows. I'm just a little bit surprised that 3 months could be summarized in such a short time 😂
Also, here's the video I used to set it up if anyone is curious - 
Comments
I recall fondly listening to a couple of my anti-Mac Windows-loving co-workers back in the 90’s actually brag about how many hours it took for them to get their new dot-matrix printers to actually function properly — describing in great detail all the work arounds, various drivers, and ingenious coding they used.
After purchasing my new Apple laser printer, I described the installation process to them:
Plug the power supply into the wall socket.
Connect the the cable from the printer to the Mac.
Power everything up.
Hit “Print!”
How long might it take on a Linux laptop? It looks like the packages your installing are Open Source and work best in a Unix variant OS. MacOS has a core of Unix/Mach features that make a lot of Open Source projects install easily. Windows has had a grudging acceptance of
Open Source projects working well on their OS'es. Are you talking Windows 10 here or something a bit older?
Anyway... I have also tried to get some projects to work on Windows and been surprised when it worked. Usually coordinating the version/release levels and the incredibly complex
installation processes of OpenSource (compounded by Windows weirdness) makes this type
of effort seem like wasted time.
Most developers that love open source tend to use Macs and Linux system for this reason and a general distaste for Microsoft's lack of effort to make things "just work". Apple has made serious efforts to capture OpenSource Developers, even if they make little effort to
make their software tools work well for this purpose.
Still... 10 minutes vs 3 months proves without a doubt: you're smart to own a MacMini if you want to play with OpenSource code. Have you considered doing this test on a Linux system?
That’s all well and good, but I’ve spent a large part of both my professional and private lives trying to troubleshoot macs that aren’t doing what they should, so I feel you’re painting a slightly rosy picture there.
@McD -Eventually...specifically Ubuntu, and Raspbian distros of Linux. For now, trying to finish the last bits of setup. All in all, thankful for the small progress.
@SNystrom Haha, that's hilarious 😂 I used to troubleshoot a lot of mobile devices not too long ago, and despite the lack of customization, it was always easier to solve an IOS related issue than an Android. Not because it was complex, but each manufacturer made changes to the overall settings and added features that were implemented in different ways.
@steve99 I hear you on this. I'm still messing up keyboard shortcuts, and miss the ability to go directly into drivers or control panel and do advanced configurations. iOS, sure I can troubleshoot...Mac? HELP, GOOGLE!!!
There are reasons that the TCO on the Mac is lower even though they are more expensive on average. But, I've always found it to be a PITA to try and work with cross compatibility layers for programming. I haven't actually tried anywhere near recently, but can't LLVM and GNU stuff be installed without any compatibility stuff on Windows now?
Raspbian has been completely easy for me to setup and maintain, so that part should be pretty smooth. My experience with Ubuntu has always been that it's pretty easy to setup and get running, but then it always breaks in very painful ways with some update or other.
Sounds like you are going to be programming something very multi-platform. Mind if I ask what you are working on?
@NeonSilicon Nothing really elaborate. For now, I'm trying to understand how AUv3 apps work, and test some ideas.
Used to be a Windows, and Android user (still am) so I had a lot of time to see how a lot of things worked.
The hardest part of figuring out the architecture of AUv3 is getting past the confusion that is induced by Apple's Xcode template for them. It's a mess. Their sample code is also overly complicated because they are covering all the ways that an AUv3 gets packaged and used. AU's themselves really aren't that complicated, but the documentation is really lacking -- no state transition diagrams, no timing diagrams.
Are you going to be mainly aiming at iOS, macOS, or both?
In case it might be helpful for you, this is a link to the old version 2 AU developer docs from when Apple did a better job of their docs.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/MusicAudio/Conceptual/AudioUnitProgrammingGuide/AudioUnitDevelopmentFundamentals/AudioUnitDevelopmentFundamentals.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40003278-CH7-SW5
Much of the AUv3 architecture is an Objective-C wrapper/bridge to the C based version 2 implementation. I find it helpful to know how that communication works to get a better idea of what is going on in the new version.
The Wikipedia page has the links to the official site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinGW
I don't know what your problem was setting up MinGW. It's been over ten years since I last did that. I do remember it being slight tricky, maybe a problem with the environment variables, and also just with understanding how to compile using the MinGW environment once it's set up (which VS Code's plugin might handle seamlessly if you're using it).
In any case, though, you might want to check into installing Microsoft's "Windows Subsystem for Linux". It's a complete Linux system that runs on Windows OS:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/
I don't use Windows for much any more, but if I wanted to program using GNU tools on Windows I would install WSL and pretend I was on a Linux machine. At least for terminal based stuff (i.e., non GUI stuff) it should work well.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/cpp/config-wsl
When I see "WSL" all I can think of is "Windows as a Second Language"
Well you're trying to install a UNIX development environment (plus a godawful IDE) on Windows. You'd have similar problems if you tried to get a .NET dev environment working on your Mac.
That said, there are definitely easier ways to get this working on Windows. The Windows Subsystem for Linux is pretty straightforward, and VSCode is trivial to install on Windows. Most Windows developers use Visual Studio and the Microsoft development tools to give you an idea.
Weird. My dad had a mixture of dotmatrix and laser printers and never had any issues with any of them. On the other hand Macs during the late 90s and early 2000s were garbage. I'm not a Windows person (the VIM shortcuts and Unix command line are burned into my synapses after nearly 30 years), but I do find a lot of this stuff rather silly.
By the late 90's the Macs were getting to be good again. The OS was crap at that point, but I was running Linux on them anyway. Apple even had their own secret Linux project going.
As are most religious arguments.
I supported both for over 30 years. Neither is drastically better in every way, but depending on what you're trying to do either can be a much better fit.
My biggest chuckle was a new CEO who came into our Windows only shop. (Windows because of compatibility with our enterprise systems which predated my tenure). This guy hated me from day one for being the IT Director of a non Mac shop. This guy used to call the IT department five times a day and bitch and moan constantly about problems that were largely just because of his attitude toward it all.
I finally decided it was better to just get the guy a Mac and deal with the incompatibilities rather than his temper. Instantly the problems evaporated! We never heard from the guy after that. I thought humm! Maybe there is something to all this. I finally quietly asked his personal assistant about it. She told me, "Oh no! He has way more problems now! He just refuses to call you and instead takes it all out on me!"
@NeonSilicon Understanding iOS applications was the main driving force. If I was thinking of doing something multi-platform, I'll most likely use the JUCE framework via Xcode to do the heavy lifting, especially as it's C++ based. That way I’d focus on designing the UI, but would have a code base that would work for multiple platforms. VS Code, because of its ease of install, would most likely be my testbed for C, SQL, and Python related scripting.
@tja - Yeah, it's something I have to install to build, compile, and make an application on Windows using something like Eclipse.
@cian - Yeah, I figured it was something like that. Again, I'm just surprised how little effort it took. Imagine setting out an entire evening to try and solve a problem, just to finish it in less than 10 minutes.
@hes - Yeah, the environmental variables were the tough part. Installing both was easy. I even tried VS Code (although just found out about coderunner from the video above...maybe it would have worked easily that way). We used Eclipse in College, so it seemed like the safe choice, but wow. I went through like 10 tutorials, tried Cygwin, before I could finally get it to work.
@wim
didn't expect that plot twist.