Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Continues Porting Visual C++ To Linux (microsoft.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates shared some news from Microsoft's Visual C++ blog: Visual Studio 2017 now lets developers write C++ code for Linux desktops, servers, and other devices without an extension, targeting specific architectures, including ARM:
Visual Studio will automatically copy and remotely build your sources and can launch your application with the debugger... Today Visual Studio only supports building remotely on the Linux target machine. It is not limited to specific Linux distros, but we do have dependencies on the presence of some tools. Specifically, we need openssh-server, g++, gdb and gdbserver.
...I wonder if they licensed any of that technology. I bought a copy of VisualGDB a few years ago and it was slick as hell. I had to port a bootloader written in C that was Windows-only, turning it into a simple command-line program on Linux. It was easy as using a native toolchain (easier, in fact, if you have Visual Studio muscle-memory), and so seamless that it was easy to forget that this was all over-the-wire interaction between a Linux box and Windows.
In my case I was porting it over to a Raspberry Pi to prototype a portable diagnostic device for a hardware project. Came out swimmingly, was one of the highest-impact things I did for them. I was starting with all Windows code, both C and C#. Between VisualGDB and Mono, the porting was extremely easy to do.
You do realise that "remote" in this instance is you own Linux machine, right? Not a closed build server owned by Microsoft - you are asked for connection information to a Linux machine so VS can copy sources, build, run and connect the debugger.
A 30 second scan of the link in the summary would have shown that up, but that might have held up your shit posting...
If I were going to switch to anything other than gcc (or support anything in addition to it), I would first go for clang and then maybe icc. I can't imagine what value vc++ would add over those.
gcc's warning/error messages are pretty awful and I really like that clangs almost always point me precisely to where the problem is, as opposed to where the problem finally made the compiler lose its mind. Does vcc++ improve on clang in that respect? If it does, I could supporting it as a build target for automated builds to get the nice diagnostics (I do this now for a project with clang), but I can't imagine it would be worthwhile for something that gets deployed.
icc is nice if you are on Intel hardware and want the sooper-dooper extra special optimizations, but that is about it.
Each additional platform takes much extra effort
This, exactly.
Since I'm developing for a Linux platform, I already have one of these here. So explain again why I have to drag another platform (Windows with Visual C++) into my toolchain when perfectly good IDEs are available for the native Linux environment.
Have gnu, will travel.
This, exactly.
Since I'm developing for a Linux platform, I already have one of these here. So explain again why I have to drag another platform (Windows with Visual C++) into my toolchain when perfectly good IDEs are available for the native Linux environment.
Explain who, exactly, is putting a gun to your head to switch to a different tool chain when what you are using now is perfectly fine?
And I want it because...why?
Maybe I'm the one with the problem. Given how easy it is to sell people something they already have for free (Dropbox, Slack, GotomyPC, etc), you'd think I'd get on the bandwagon and go into business selling people the ability to click their mouse or type Latin characters on their keyboards.
Are they porting compiler and build system or the entire IDE?
If they are porting IDE than with what? Isn't VS IDE done with WPF these days? Perhaps they target...ehem...WINE?
Or are they rebuilding it around Visual Studio Code?
As usual, the Slashdot article title is misleading. What they are describing is not really the porting of Visual Studio to Linux, although MS has been hinting at that for awhile. What the article is describing is the integration of the IDE (running on Windows) with a Linux tool chain (running on Linux). Which per my earlier post, has been possible before with third-party Visual Studio add-ons. For some use cases it is a win.
If you are not already a Visual Studio user and are developing exclusively for Linux, then you are not the target audience.
I suppose when you're aiming for first post you don't have too much time to think of anything more constructive.
What, framing the discussion properly is not constructive? See, if Microsoft had ever genuinely reformed, then it would indeed be unconstructive to respond to Microsoft's potentially worthy initiative in such a perjorative way. But Microsoft never did reform. It is unnecessary to look any further than Microsoft's shenanigans with Windows 10 to be sure of that, just the tip of the iceberg. So, actually, "fuck Microsoft" is a lot more constructive than you seem to believe: it helps keeps us alert to evil intent, should there be any, irrespective of the possibility that there might really be none in this case. Not that I have the slightest interest in adopting Microsoft's development platform. I am perfectly happy and productive with the one I have now, the development of which is controlled by people I trust.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I think they need to stop charging for VS otherwise they may get .. well eclipsed.
They have had free versions of Visual Studio for a some years now, and according to the comments at the bottom of the article this Linux remote compilation works with the community (free) version too.
You do realize that most of the complaints you have are basically moving a Linux desktop more toward what MS has done with Windows desktop. PulseAudio bears no small resemblence to Windows Vista+ audio stack (in terms of architecture). systemd similarly resembles the way microsoft services work, journald resembles event viewer design, networkmanager is pretty much the same way Windows does network management, dconf acts a lot like the registry.
If anything, I'd say MS is worse at many of these. As much as I object to journald, event viewer is worse. systemd does make some things more complex, but not nearly so much as the way microsoft handles services. dconf is at least more straightforward and more powerful than windows registry.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So basically they're just porting the IDE.
No. The IDE still runs under Windows. This extension uses SSH to run the compiler on a remote Linux system.
Remind me again why I'd spend money on this instead of just freely using eclipse or netbeans or something?
You don't have to spend money on Visual Studio. This extension works with the free Community edition as well as the paid version. But if you don't currently use Visual Studio then you don't need change just for this feature. It is only really useful if you also want to use the software to develop Windows and mobile applications.
Visual Studio was always a MAJOR advantage of Windows
Always? No. Vance Petree said, "I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you." Until Visual Studio 2005, the emacs/gcc/gdb stack was clearly better (once you got over the learning curve). It was not even a question, visual studio sucked.
Now Visual Studio is definitely an advantage of Windows.......but only for people who prefer Visual Studio. For people who have preference for certain tools, like the Valgrind suite, Linux is still better. And don't talk to me about autocomplete, even fucking vi has autocomplete now.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The title here is extremely deceptive because MSVC isn't being ported to Linux at all. What they are doing is creating a way to target Linux. It's still just development on a Windows desktop, not development on a Linux desktop.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Personally I think "Fuck microsoft" perfectly sums it up. They spent decades attacking FOSS and hindering progress to line their own pockets. So yeah, fuck them.
Are you a troll? Or, perhaps, one of James Plamondon's "Linux technical evangelists", a.k.a. digital terrorists, because of the postings they make on various computer or technical websites. Joe Baar wrote well of them with his article "SLIME".
I've been using Linux since May of 1998 with RH 5.0. I've experimented with lots of distros and spent time with Mandrake, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE and a few others. For its time RH 5.0 was marvelous, compared to Win95, and so it has been. The current Linux distro I was using was equal to or better than any version of Windows available at the time. From January of 2009 I used Kubuntu, until about 6 months ago when I moved to KDE Neon User Edition.
I've never had a "reliability" problem with any version of Linux I've used. My Acer V3-771 has an Intel HD Graphics primary and an NVidia GT650M secondary which cannot be set as primary in the BIOS. Despite that, when I installed the nvidia-370 driver it made my NVidia chip the primary and everything runs on it.
Next, you complain about not being able to do "real" work on Linux. Before I retired in 2008 I was using Linux (SUSE) to write in house client-server apps using Qt4's API. I used compiler defines to switch between PostgreSQL code on Linux and Oracle code on Windows during compilation. I used Linux because I could code, debug and compile 2-3X faster on Linux.
It's a poor workman who blames his tools.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!