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Comment by pletnes | Hacker News Reader

One of the worst problems with using windows (in my opinion) is that there’s no native GNU make.

> One of the worst problems with using windows (in my opinion) is that there’s no native GNU make.

GNU Make even comes with a vcproj file for building a native binary with Visual Studio. Worked fine for me. Building it with Guile support though is difficult, but fortunately Eli Zaretskii provides native binaries through his ezwinports, and they worked pretty much flawlessly for me. Of course you will usually need a shell to execute recipes, but Make itself runs natively. For more information, see README.W32 in the sources.

Scoop has it in their repos as well (the gow package).

There are a number of ports of GNU Make to Windows. MSYS2 [1], for examples, provides a reasonable development environment that includes Make.

If you just want a Make, there is [2] which can be installed separately and is part of the GNUWin32 collection.

[1] https://www.msys2.org/ [2] http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/make.htm

Isn't non-native development on Windows a solved problem nowadays with WSL(2)?

WSL is currently horrendously (unusably, IMO) slow. WSL2 promises a 20x speed up, but it was already 100x slower than native Linux at some actually-realistic workloads that happen all the time when you're developing (e.g. `git grep`), so it's probably still too slow to be tolerable.

I had the opposite problem of wanting to develop some stuff for Windows from a Linux environment, and I settled on running a linux VM and copying binaries over by scping to WSL, which works reasonably well.

A nice thing with WSL is that you get working make and rsync. But I would like make for coding on native windows. Many FOSS projects use Makefile as the parent post described.

Windows does ship nmake but it is a little different.

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