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Comment by bacongobbler | Hacker News Reader

My only gripe with Makefiles is the lack of support on Windows. I work on several Go projects, all of which use a Makefile. It makes for a great experience on MacOS and Linux, but on Windows I have to break down the Makefile logic into powershell scripts or run raw `go test/build`. Both are fine, but just pointing out the fact that it's not a silver bullet if your project is intended to work across multiple platforms (like a CLI).

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If you use Cmder[1] as your terminal, and you install the full package, make is bundled with it and works exactly as you'd expect it to. I do this with a couple of cross platform Go projects, and make works nicely on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Of course, this is less useful if it's a team project, because then everyone will have to install Cmder (or at least msys) to use the Makefile on a Windows system.

[1]http://cmder.net/

Sure, I have `make` installed and I'm using cmder, but some things do not translate well in Windows.

https://cognitivewaves.wordpress.com/makefiles-windows/

MSYS2 offers a nice and relatively lean Unix-like build environment on top of Win32. It's especially convenient if your dependencies happen to be in their Pacman package repo (and if not, you can submit them to it...).

Does WSL not solve that?

If you do your build under WSL, you'll get a Linux binary. Which may or may not be OK, depending on what you're after.

Nope. Here: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WindowsCrossCompiling

Ah, that's a good point. You just need to remember to set the right environment variables. Unless you need to link against MSVC stuff, although I don't know if Go supports that anyway.

Doesn't look like go works with msvc yet - the following issue was a fascinating read (partly because of the optimism and persistence displayed, partly in a ohmigoditsatrainwreckcantlookaway-way ;)

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20982

It isn't always as simple as setting some environment variables. None of the projects I work on will compile when told to compile for another OS_ARCH because of the dependencies they have.

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