OneAndOneIs2

Fri, Apr 25, 2008

For my sins...

Some of you may remember I got a new laptop around Christmas time. It came with Vista.

Because my internet connection was through WiFi and then through a USB mobile broadband thingy, both of which are a pain to get working under Linux; and because all I was doing with it was using it to run Firefox and Thunderbird, although I set it up for dual-boot, I got into the habit of using it booted into Windows.

MS's worst nightmare: The OS as an irrelevance [Smiley]

But now I'm trying to get back into programming and C. And my, how I miss my comfortable Bash+Vim+gcc combination

Well, actually, I have all three because I always have cygwin installed on any Windows machine I'm going to use regularly. But it's pretty slow.

I tried MinGW in hopes that it would be better, but found it so arcane I've wiped it again.

People are always telling me Windows has all the great IDEs and stuff. Outside of cygwin, what's the best way to compile & run simple C programs?

6 comments • Categories: Omni, FOSS, Technology, My Life, Programming

Comments:

Comment from: Åke [Visitor]

· http://akeiexil.wordpress.com

I mainly use the DevC++-IDE (http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html) when I'm working in windows. It includes the gnu compiler suite and has a nice package system allowing you to download and install libraries in an easy way.

It's not quite as flexible as the Bash+Vim+gcc+combo but it's quite easy to get started with it and development is smooth.

Permalink 25/04/08 @ 19:19

Comment from: herd [Visitor]

· http://erduman.de

Although their exe-loaders disguised as operating systems suck, their IDEs can teach ours.
Try MS's Visual C++ 2005 express edition.

Also learn to debug and single-step as soon as possible.

Permalink 25/04/08 @ 20:42

Comment from: Al [Visitor]

· http://eggfriedrice.com

+1 for Bloodshed, I used it last year at college for a C programming course. It was handy as I used GCC on Linux at home so I was using essentially the same compiler in both places.

Permalink 25/04/08 @ 22:45

Comment from: Citronella [Visitor]

· http://unsubstantialbubbles.blogspot.com

DevC++ is easy, but it's not quite what I would recommend for "simple" C programs... I found it pretty heavy. A bit like using MS Word when all you need is a text editor. (Except that DevC++ won't mess with your stuff.)

But, as I don't have any other recommendation than that under Windows, maybe I'd just better shut up.

Permalink 26/04/08 @ 00:54

Comment from: hari [Member]

· http://hari.literaryforums.org

I cannot recommend Windows as a platform for learning any programming languages at all.

I think Microsoft's C/C++ compiler is Free. Only the enterprise IDE/tools costs money. You should probably check that out too.

Oh, and the basic IDE is free too:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/

Permalink 26/04/08 @ 07:39

Comment from: oneandoneis2 [Member] · http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/

Thanks for the feedback, all. I've discovered that cygwin for bash and GCC, and the Windows version of Vim, seems to work best for me. I'm a CLI-boy at heart :o)

Permalink 03/05/08 @ 21:01