> I just want to cross compile to target Windows.
What's the point, you can't debug or even run such an executable? What developer is just going to compile stuff without testing it? It makes no sense to want this.
What's the point, you can't debug or even run such an executable? What developer is just going to compile stuff without testing it? It makes no sense to want this.
I can and I do. Don't be so unimaginative.
For starters, Wine actually works really well. And beside that, time spent writing code is measurable in weeks while time spent running an executable to test or debug is measurable in minutes. The amount of time spent testing and debugging is a tiny fraction of the time spent coding. RDP/VNCing for one of them every second of the day can be a huge pain in the ass. Doing it for the other once in a while is a minor inconvenience.
Next time just say "I'm glad I don't have that problem" instead of "You can't possibly". A mindset like that ends up making you look foolish, because you'll be wrong most of the time.
That said, we also have to be able to encourage others to present their ideas. We clearly can't grow if we don't hear and consider external ideas. It's a difficult balance to strike.
Maintaining two separate development environments, on two operating systems that you have to boot into separately is very annoying. Developing for an operating system other than the one you're running is about as old as the personal computer, I think :).
If time and cost was no option, sure I'd agree with you. Put everything on everything. But this is such a niche situation that's not worth the cost.
This is a niche situation only because Microsoft's tools make it a niche situation. It's pretty much how all embedded software on this planet is developed (except that the network is replaced by a serial connection on the lower end of the performance spectrum, of course). In nix world, it's a super-common situation; e.g. at $work, where I write software for networking equipment, no one seriously expects that I'm going to compile stuff on the routers that ends up running that software. Most of them are capable of the required heavy lifting (they have CPUs in the same performance class as a pretty beefy desktop), but why?