Cross-compiler vs Visual Studio

[rdos]

Some of my OS users that are more used to Visual Studio have made some customizations that allows them to work with Visual Studio for most things (excluding building the project itself), instead of the less familiar OpenWatcom IDE. They do this by changing path settings to the editor.

But using Visual Studio to build is not something that works, unless it is also possible to customize makefiles, since Visual Studio only builds Windows executables with loads of Windows dependencies.

[kutkloon7]

For those interested, Visual Studio was a pain to use. GCC indeed is much nicer to use (that is, when you finally set it up and wrote proper makefiles and linker scripts, which took some time to learn/do but I consider it a valuable lesson on how compilers, linkers and loaders work).

[AndrewAPrice]

Why was Visual Studio a pain?

The things I really like about Visual Studio is that they (mostly) listen to their audience, there's an update every couple of months, and there's extensions for most languages and tools (Node.js, GCC/GDB, MinGW/CLANG/Emscripten, Oracle, Visual Assist, Java).

The disadvantages of Visual Studio are.. it's expensive (unless your employer pays for it), the Microsoft C++ compiler doesn't have inline assembly for x64 code (although you can link with MASM or use another compiler), it's Windows only, and sometimes it can be bulky and slow (mostly it's when dealing with XAML/Silverlight projects, fine for C++).

[kutkloon7]

For normal development, visual studio is an excellent choice. However, for OS development, it just doesn't work that smooth. For instance, I just couldn't get it to compile without the standard libraries. In GCC this was a breeze to do. Same thing with some linker-related things. It was just too hard to figure out in visual studio.