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Comment by fnord123 | Hacker News Reader

Windows still doesn't come with a C compiler? At least it finally comes with ssh, right?

Might be an off-topic, but recently I learned that Windows does come with a C# compiler. It's included in the .NET runtime, which is installed by default nowadays. This might be useful if you're extremely lazy to install any language implementation. It is quite amazing since even Ubuntu doesn't ship a C/C++ compiler by default.

I'm surprised Ubuntu doesn't come with gcc.

You type in 'sudo apt-get install build-essentials' and you have it. I don't what the process on Windows these days but you used to have to find visual studio install media, install it, and reboot two or three times.

I don't what the process on Windows these days

1) Go to visualstudio.com

2) click Downloads

if you want the full IDE:

3) choose between downloading free version of a trial of the professional version

if you just want the command line tools

3) scroll down until you find C++ Build Tools and download that

4) double click the file you just downloaded.

5) Done

No more reboots?

Not that I can recall, at least not on Windows 10.

Yeah, visual studio now installs decently.

Uninstall or upgrade is still a nightmare, but installing it on a PC which has never had it isn't bad.

It'd be great to have it built-in but you can get https://chocolatey.org and MinGW pretty easily:

  iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex

restart prompt, then:

  choco install mingw

(no machine reboots, disclaimer: I work at MSR, nothing related to this)

I learned this when my boss was wringing his hands over an Excel job that was too complicated to do comfortably in VBA. I'm not allowed to install anything on the computers because I'm a flunky technician.

I started poking around the C:\Windows directory to see if there was something that I could use, and I found C:\Windows\Windows.NET\

"Wait a second - C# is .NET, right?"

A hundred lines of C# later, I had a solution for my boss where you drag the CSV onto the program and it spits out another CSV. I would've liked to have the ability to grab an Excel file, but that requires installing another library... can't do it.

It doesn't really matter when it comes to Python, for the most part. Most big packages now distribute wheels which include pre-compiled binaries. I.e. no need for a compilation toolchain on Python. It's been like this for a year or so, I think, and continuously getting better.

Windows still doesn't come with a C compiler

Not with the default install, but it's a free download from microsoft if you want one (either as part of an IDE or as a standalone command line tool). An official native port of OpenSSH is in beta and should be ready to ship officially soon.

bash subsystem in Windows 10 is pretty amazing in where it presently is and where it is going.

https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows

You can compile C++ in Visual Studio and build a binary for Linux with gcc.

UNIX also not, since Sun decided it was a good idea to sell the SDK separately, thus leading some companies to sponsor the until then largely ignored GCC.

The *BSDs and GNU/Linux variants are the exception to this.

In any case, Visual C++ and the plain command line SDK are a download away.

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