RE: [gentoo-user] Cross Compiling in Gentoo

[Mike Edenfield]

> From: Chris Walters [mailto:cjw2004d@×××××××.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 9:27 AM
>
> On 1/17/2012 08:39 AM, Mike Edenfield wrote:
> > On 1/17/2012 1:55 AM, Chris Walters wrote:
> >> that have make files for MS Visual Studio.  I have no interest in
> >> purchasing Visual Studio.
> >
> > Just a point of interest: "Visual Studio" doesn't use Makefiles;
> > Visual C++ can import Makefile projects if you ask it to, but it has
> > its own project file format. If you're seeing actual make files (and
> > not, say, a .sln file or .cproj
> > file) then you don't need Studio, just an nmake-compatible version of
> make.
> >
> > If you do have project and solution files from Visual Studio, they are
> > just MSBuild projects (think "ant for Windows"). I'm pretty sure there
> > are open-source variants of MSBuild, possibly in the Mono project?
> >
> > And of course, Visual C++ Express is free, though you'd need to find
> > somewhere to set it up.
>
> Just a note:  I used to do all of my programming in Visual Studio.  I stopped
> when I needed to do things that VS wouldn't let me do, and also because I
> discovered GNU/Linux.

While I program a lot on my Linux machines, I haven't actually found an IDE that doesn't make me wish VS ran on Linux. MonoDevelop isn't horrible but if I wanted to write .NET code I'd just use Windows; Eclipse makes me want to drill my brain out with a corkscrew and the only other decent IDE's I've seen are KDE-specific. I've falling back to the default of Emacs at this point; it's powerful enough, especially when I'm doing Lisp or Scheme, but I have an internal mental limit of 150,110 hotkey combinations that I think is holding me back. If you have any suggestions I'm all ears :)
 
> As for the types of files I've seen, I have seen both VS Solution/Project files,
> and nmake files.  Most of the time, I just use the configure script with
> x86_64-w64-mingw32 as my host, and it works fine.
>
> Do you, by chance, know where I can find an nmake-compatible version of
> make?

> Also, do you have a link for Visual C++ Express?  I like to do most
> programming in C/C++ anyway (though this is OT).

Well, if you're willing to go the "install a Windows OS" route, everything you need command-line wise is found in the Windows SDK: 
	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb980924.aspx.  
Visual C++ 2010 Express can be downloaded from: 
	http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/visual-cpp-express 
Mostly what you lose with Express are the TFS integrations, unit testing, and other "application lifecycle management" stuff they pack into the full editions. Express editions can't build & debug 64-bit applications, but the 64-bit compilers come with the SDK. Depends on how much effort you're willing to put into it. 

If you don't want to install Windows you're options are going to be mostly limited to the GNU binutils and GCC, which support targeting Win32 and Win64.  In theory you could run the command-line tools, for example, under Wine, but I've never tried it. I don't actually know of a make for Linux that is compatible with NMAKE. If you can't find one then you'll need to do a lot of work to build any applications that require it. However, I think the number of applications using Microsoft make files is vanishingly small: they're either going to produce a GNU makefile (since GNU make runs on Windows) or an MSBuild project.

And yes, AT&T also released a tool called "nmake" that is not compatible with Microsoft NMAKE (or either of the other two incompatible makes), so don't get them confused.

--Mike