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Comment by npalli | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft, please port Visual studio to OS X.

That would be amazing. Using XCode is very frustrating. I don't understand how Apple can actually write their software using XCode. No support for bookmarks. Very bad find/replace usability. Scrolling text is painful even on my brand new top of the range MBP. Sometimes I have to switch to Sublime for some editing tasks that are too painful in XCode.

I've started using AppCode for actually writing code and just using XCode for the interface builder. Trying to transition from IntelliJ to XCode was very painful.

The thought of porting a decades old, 50 million line code base from windows to Unix, one that was deemed too complex to retrofit 64 bit support, makes me put my own insignificant development hassles of the past few days in perspective.

No matter how bad it seems, at least I'm not on that team.

I recently had this very same realization after opening some crusty PPTX on Android and seeing those awful animations.

The poor soul that had to port that stuff..

There's a pretty interesting video of how the Office team uses C++ for their cross-platform efforts from CppCon 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4

"Welcome to hell. Here's your 15 year old MSC code base to port to OS X."

You couldn't pay me enough... not because I wouldn't want a fat salary, but because I literally do not think I could actually bring myself to do it. It would require drugs.

You could still take the fat salary until they found out it's not working (because, of course, it cannot possibly work). If they decided the code base is too crufty (instead of deeming you incompetent) you could still keep the fat salary and land in another realm of the company. Unfortunately for you, the odds of them deciding the codebase is too crufty (and, therefore, that the very senior exec sitting on it managed its aging poorly) are not good.

I worked with an ex-Microsoftie who was responsible for getting Excel onto the Mac, in the 1990s. He quit and swore off computers for a couple of years, and we had to convince him that (a) we were a great company and he should definitely interview with us, and (b) we weren't going to treat him the way Microsoft had.

He was pretty good, but there were parts of his psyche that seemed . . . damaged.

True: hiring non-programmers from top schools and then giving them tasks like "fake out multifinder enough that WinHelp runs" is a unique form of cruelty. But most work in the 1990s was like that. He should be glad he landed at Microsoft instead of Commodore or 3DO or half a dozen other places.

Stack ranking will do that too you, its like working in 1940 era USSR

Visual Studio in even the shittiest, crufty Windows VM is a better experience than Xcode. Seriously Apple, what is the deal?

Shocking enough I have a couple of friends that love XCode... I guess there is room for everybody (Although I can't stand XCode either)

I love XCode, used VS for many many years and wouldn't go back. I love IntelliJ also, but XCode is a close second

There are so many things Xcode does worse than Visual Studio, and so few things it does better. 5:1 ratio. Yesterday I was dealing with how Xcode's disassembly mode debugging is so bad compared to VS that it's nearly unusable.

I don't see why people complain so much about Xcode. I haven't used VS for a few years now, but I have bad memories of it. Xcode is in my opinion excellent compared to Visual Studio (especially for C/C++ work).

Which xcode? Objective-c or swift? Swift xcode is not really good. Sometime i have to clean cache folder when xcode intelisense is not working

Visual Studio is way more than what one sees at the first look. Huge part (and value) of it is the probably unparalleled debugging/profiling capabilities. That are very much Windows specific, porting them to OSX/Linux means writing a lot of new code, not just taking the old stuff and adapting it.

Their first steps I would think would be allowing support for other compilers in Windows like GCC and Clang maybe? But again all this is every programmers pipe dream for now...

I'm guessing this is just for mobile, but you might be interesting in this pic from the article https://i3-vso.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC794253.jpg

Also, a quick google turned up this: http://www.ishani.org/projects/ClangVSX/

GCC is pretty much written such that non-GPLed code cannot interact with it. You could use it as a compiler, I guess, but Intellisense and such wouldn't work with GCC.

Microsoft, please don't. Instead, write a version of V.S. specifically for OS X.

Does VS support C99 yet? While we're making requests I'd like that to get on the list.

Yes, 2013 added support for most of it and 2015 adds a few more things.

Specifically, in 2015 our C99 Standard Library implementation is complete, except for tgmath.h (irrelevant in C++) and the CX_LIMITED_RANGE/FP_CONTRACT pragma macros.

Back when I first had the shock of discovering that VS only supported C89 I remember poking around to figure out why and finding a rant from a higher-up on the compiler team along the lines of "C is a dead language, just use C++." What happened? Did he leave? Did an order come down from on high? Did he mellow with age?

Doesn't the latest C++ standard more or less include C99?

Only the C99 standard library. The language changes which weren't already part of C++ weren't imported.

I believe the choice was to spend time on adding C99 support, vs spending more time on C++ support. C++ had more people asking for it, so it got priority over C99.

Our current statement of support is that we support enough of C99 to unblock commonly used libraries. We support a large swath of C99 but it is correct that our support isn't complete yet as we prioritized C++ conformance. If there is a C99 library that you need to use that we don't work with, please let me know. (I'm the VC++ dev manager)

It seems that MSVC really has improved its support for C99, though, and I'm glad about that. What about C11? Does it support _Atomic/stdatomic.h? I can't tell from Googling, and I'm too tired to install the CTP tonight... If it does, it'd be ahead of OS X, hopefully not for long. The C11/C++11 memory model is powerful, way nicer to use than volatile plus OS-specific library functions, and, compared to other features, it's difficult to properly implement as a shim. It's too bad that only C++ can take advantage of it on some platforms.

Existing libraries are one thing, but when writing new code (and yes, I want to write new code in C), one of the big three compilers not supporting a feature is strong motivation not to use it... even if it would be really nice to have. Maybe in the coming years Clang will improve its Windows support enough that I can just tell everyone to swap it in for cl.exe, so I won't have to care about MSVC's standards support, but for now it and GCC are missing a lot of features on Windows.

The C11 Standard Library has not been incorporated into any C++ Standard (not even the C++17 Working Paper as of right now), so we have not attempted to support it. On the other hand, our C++11 <atomic> implementation has been significantly improved in VC 2015.

Huh... Didn't know STL was on HN.. Good to see you here! :)

When I was 16 years old I would get into the nuwen IRC where I learned and really started my whole programming education / career through STL. I still remember the std::vector explanation that included cats in buckets. Prior to him I only opened VB's IDE and...that was it. He had me writing algorithms in C++.

Too bad I'm so rusty in C++ nowadays; need to get back on it. I like using the nuwen MinGW distro when I worked on Windows; made picking up boost and SDL really simple.

(Just figured I'd share since you mentioned him; he probably doesn't remember me at all but without him I don't know if I would have ever become a developer. In fact at the time I was thinking about becoming a doctor but was a lazy high schooler who dreaded the years of education required)

Ha, that's cool to hear!

I haven't used Visual Studio to compile C in a long long time, but does it support compiling files as C files as well? For example:

char ptr = malloc(10); // this is not valid C++

char ptr = (char *)malloc(10); // This is usually required for Visual C++ (or was).

Yes, on the properties of the file you can specify whether to compile as C or C++. It can also be set as a project default.

I believe files with the .c extensions are compiled as C, not C++.

Please edit to add an asterisk in front of ptr in both cases.

It's the markdown getting in the way. You can tell by the varying italics.

Indeed. Still needs to be fixed.

complex.h seems very incomplete.

It does if you compile with Clang - VS is just a front-end after all. If you're asking about MSVC however, it's incomplete.

And Linux, really.

I suspect it's in the works. I don't know how reliant it is on Win32 APIs (probably awfully reliant), but some work to isolate those calls and attempt to bring POSIX into the fold could certainly be possible. I guess it's really a matter of getting developers on Mac to buy into using Visual Studio, which could be a challenge.

... and Linux, for that matter. They could pwn the IDE space.

That would be amazing. I feel like that may be part of their end goal but it would take quite some time before it happens.

Visual Studio, like Eclipse, is really heavy but it's difficult to find an IDE that's better.

The WHOLE THING? Do you really want that?

Dont, please dont. Save people resource to focus on visual studio windows. Maybe the better solution is use different approach, send minor team to assist xamarin fixing xamarin studio fixbug

never say never.

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