Life goes on it's merry way independedent of Usenet and programming, and
I can now sleep at my own house once more, and I dusted off a Windows
machine which had been laid up for four years. And of course I wanted to
simply compile the flood fill code and run some quick tests.

And what a nightmare. The whole evening getting the machine back in the
land of the living. What should be routine - compile an ANSI C program
which calls the standard library, is just not made routine. 3GB of
components had to be downloaded, and a runtime library obtained and
downloaded specially. Then the project setting need fiddling with in
unexpected and not very obvious ways.

Utter, utter unacceptable chaos and difficulty and hurdles. Considering
that 4 years ago it was set up to compile a C program.

On Sun, 17 Mar 2024 08:02:40 +0000
Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> wrote:

> Life goes on it's merry way independedent of Usenet and programming,
> and I can now sleep at my own house once more, and I dusted off a
> Windows machine which had been laid up for four years. And of course
> I wanted to simply compile the flood fill code and run some quick
> tests.
>
> And what a nightmare. The whole evening getting the machine back in
> the land of the living. What should be routine - compile an ANSI C
> program which calls the standard library, is just not made routine.
> 3GB of components had to be downloaded, and a runtime library
> obtained and downloaded specially. Then the project setting need
> fiddling with in unexpected and not very obvious ways.
>

It's much easier if you don't insist on using Visual Studio GUI.
cl.exe is still the same cl.exe with the same options.
Downloads are nonsensically huge, that's true. But that was already
true four years ago.

> Utter, utter unacceptable chaos and difficulty and hurdles.
> Considering that 4 years ago it was set up to compile a C program.

What prevented you from using existing setup?

On 17/03/2024 10:01, Michael S wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Mar 2024 08:02:40 +0000
> Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Life goes on it's merry way independedent of Usenet and programming,
>> and I can now sleep at my own house once more, and I dusted off a
>> Windows machine which had been laid up for four years. And of course
>> I wanted to simply compile the flood fill code and run some quick
>> tests.
>>
>> And what a nightmare. The whole evening getting the machine back in
>> the land of the living. What should be routine - compile an ANSI C
>> program which calls the standard library, is just not made routine.
>> 3GB of components had to be downloaded, and a runtime library
>> obtained and downloaded specially. Then the project setting need
>> fiddling with in unexpected and not very obvious ways.
>>
>
> It's much easier if you don't insist on using Visual Studio GUI.
> cl.exe is still the same cl.exe with the same options.
> Downloads are nonsensically huge, that's true. But that was already
> true four years ago.
>
>> Utter, utter unacceptable chaos and difficulty and hurdles.
>> Considering that 4 years ago it was set up to compile a C program.
>
> What prevented you from using existing setup?
>
>
They grant a "Licence" and you have to provide an email so thay can link
you up to social media databases and sell things to you or who knows
what, in exchange for developing on their platform. And the email was an
old one which had expired. So the compiler was no longer usable. And
they don't seem to allow you to associate new email with the old, and
obtain a new licence. So I gave up and downloaded Visual Studio 2022.
Which to be fair, I should do.
--
Check out Basic Algorithms and my other books:
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/bgy1mm

Malcolm McLean wrote:
> Life goes on it's merry way independedent of Usenet and programming, and
> I can now sleep at my own house once more, and I dusted off a Windows
> machine which had been laid up for four years. And of course I wanted to
> simply compile the flood fill code and run some quick tests.
>
> And what a nightmare. The whole evening getting the machine back in the
> land of the living. What should be routine - compile an ANSI C program
> which calls the standard library, is just not made routine. 3GB of
> components had to be downloaded, and a runtime library obtained and
> downloaded specially. Then the project setting need fiddling with in
> unexpected and not very obvious ways.
>
> Utter, utter unacceptable chaos and difficulty and hurdles. Considering
> that 4 years ago it was set up to compile a C program.

so call it a blota/sh*t etc as i would probably do and dlownload mingw
(to c:\MinGw)

then write a compile.bat with such

set PATH=c:\mingw\bin;

g++ program.c -Wl,--subsystem,windows -lgdi32 -o lore.exe -w -s
-O2 -fmerge-all-constants -fno-rtti -fno-threadsafe-statics -L.
-l"green.fire" -lwinmm

pause

create program.c file (with total commander ofcourse and your favorite
editor) ..then run compile.bat (by pressing enter in toital commanedr)
to compile, ..run lore.exe to run

very conveniant environment on windows