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First of all, let me get the standard complaint out of the way about their updates causing me problems way too frequently on everything from my video to my network stack.
Second, as I've coded more cross platform things in C++ these days, it has become painfully apparent to me just how proprietary Windows is designed. Apple's OS is POSIX. Unixes are POSIX. Heck, even my little ESP32 IoT devices are kinda POSIX - at least as much as they can be. This means that if I want to use sockets, I can write the same or almost the same code for each platform. Same for memory mapped files, etc. So my code has to fork specifically for Windows and only Windows. This is especially critical in C++ where there isn't a massive framework that encompasses modern OS functionality like there is with say, Java or .NET.
Finally, outside of Visual Studio, their development tools are the worst. Thank you Microsoft though, for VS Code, which makes Visual Studio less important. I'm sorry, I know I'll probably get a lot of pushback for this, but on paper, in broad strokes, Microsoft's C++ compiler is a lot more standard in theory than it is in practice. Microsoft's compiler team apparently has never quite understood templates. You can't metaprogram with the thing. It won't resolve complex constexpr statements very well either. Not the way GCC and Clang can. Bottom line is I can write code that will compile on gcc or clang with a -std=C++XX option and get reliable results - the code will also compile on other compilers using that same option. I haven't figured out how to do that with Microsoft's offering. Their compiler barfs on almost everything nontrivial I've ever written using templates. Also GCC is built on the LLVM backend (which can even render to asm.js) which Microsoft has no answer for. I'll take the best compiler over the best IDE any day of the week, if I have to choose. GCC and Clang are it. I use GCC to build windows dlls and exes these days.
I have more issues with it I'm sure, but I'll have to wait until the next time Windows reminds me of one.
It's getting to the point where I'm looking for an excuse to leave it behind altogether.
Flame away.
Real programmers use butterflies
modified 18-May-21 7:33am.
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You could give it up all together and take up black magick sorcery...or not. Not sure it will get any better.
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I like to combine that with programming though. it makes maintenance fun.
Real programmers use butterflies
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It's the chicken sacrifice each time I instantiate a class that gets me ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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You know, if you had a horcrux you could just plant it in some cemetery dirt and spare the poultry. It's less messy, but has some nasty side effects, like potential immortality.
Real programmers use butterflies
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It also doesn't work with abstract base classes.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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That's not standard. I keep saying MS's compiler is not standard, but then you look at websites like cppreference.com that strongly suggest that it is. And yet... in practice it is awful. Nothing that actually puts the compiler to work will compile with their compiler. Template support is creaky at best, and while I didn't know about the abstract base class limitation it surprises me not at all, although I'm not entirely sure what you mean, because I use pure virtual classes with MS's compiler. I know that works because ATL will compile. Still, yeah.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I think OG meant that a chicken sacrifice didn't work when trying to instantiate an abstract class. It's that dry British sense of humour thing.
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My fault. I came back to the thread way late and lost the plot.
Real programmers use butterflies
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OriginalGriff wrote: It's the chicken sacrifice each time I instantiate a class that gets me Use a lawyer or politician. They appear to be an unlimited resource, no matter where you live, and there is no chance of an emotional attachment. Instantiate enough classes and you might win an award!
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Sacrificing a goat sometimes helps, too, but it can get messy when there are a lot of dependencies.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Did you ever read Harry Turtledove's The Toxic Spell Dump? I'm not sure that magic (however you spell it) would less problems than engineering.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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No, I have not read the book. After reviewing online, I think I might actually get this book and read it. Interesting.
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Windows Update be gone:
At an Elevated cmd prompt:
net stop wuauserv (repeat as necessary until it stops)
sc delete wuauserv
Additionally, you might shift delete c:\windows\software distribution (downloaded update cache)
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If only. WUAUSERV is stopped + disabled, I set Windows Update to do as little as I can through configuration. Yet today Windows is still telling me it won't let me put off a restart any longer, it is going to restart "out of hours" regardless. I even did a manual restart this morning (after the first notification), but me restarting apparently will not cut the mustard. Half an hour after my reboot, it's telling me again that it's going to restart tonight.
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If you want to delay updates, use Win Update Stop. It works (delays the inevitable, but it's up to you when.)
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Thanks. That will handle some of it. I haven't done anything about it because it's not actually my most pressing complaint - that would be MS's C++ compiler or maybe the non-posix OS. I'm not sure. Maybe it depends on my mood, or what I'm coding in the moment.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Their tools have always been crap, excluding the VS IDEs, that's how Borland and others became popular.
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I agree with you. I moved to Linux at home and do all the development I can via VS Code editor.
However, for work I'm still doing Windows Services and Windows Form-based development so I simply remote to work using Linux Remmina program (which is 100x better than MS RDP) and do my work on Windows.
I do have a laptop running Windows and I find it is so much slower and I still haven't installed Visual Studio on it because its such a huge monster of a mess.
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yep. this is what cross-platform programming is all about - writing for the Least Common Denominator.
for extra fun, throw in AIX, HPUX and a couple of versions of Solaris (especially the one that doesn't recognize 'namespace')
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Eww. I have standards.
Real programmers use butterflies
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"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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TBH I am quite surprised that an über-techy coder like like you has not gone Linux, ages ago. vscode+Linux worx like a charm.
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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I'm in the northwest. it's microsoft territory up here and that's how i made my bones. so i guess maybe it's inertia that keeps me using it? There are some must have apps I run though that aren't available for other operating systems.
Real programmers use butterflies
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You can run those apps on Linux too: Opensource.com[^]
...or you could create a file-share, and access your Windows-box over remote desktop.
Linux does lack some nifty GUI tools e.g. like the ones that came out of Sysinternals, but the command-line tools provide all such info. The command-line is an acquired taste, I daresay.
For me the transition started at work. Everything we do there runs on Linux servers, every dev uses Linux, for over a year I stubbornly stuck to Visual Studio with Samba-mounts and what not, and ofc I could not use the VS debugger. (For debugging I logged into the Linux env and used dbg, on the command-line, but that is another story.) So in the end I went "eff it" and now I run Linux. At home I code on Linux too now, and I never looked back. I still have an old 12-core Windows-monster sitting in a closet. I use that remotely, for chess analysis only.
Nudge nudge.
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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