Sometimes we just need to vent. But we can't do that on a regular thread, or we run the risk of starting a flame war and driving our precious ranking number deep into double digits.

So here is a place to vent.

Go.

I will start. I have been trying for two days now to get a C++ compiler working on my home computer. I don't know when this stuff got so hard. It used to be you searched the CDs that came with your programming books for a copy of Visual Studio 6.0, installed that, and wrote some code. What if you were on Mac or Linux? Ha. No one made games on those, so it wasn't an issue.

No Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android, iPad, HTML5, flash, or anything else. Just a good old win32 app and a crappy C++ IDE. How I miss you...

I will start. I have been trying for two days now to get a C++ compiler working on my home computer. I don't know when this stuff got so hard. It used to be you searched the CDs that came with your programming books for a copy of Visual Studio 6.0, installed that, and wrote some code. What if you were on Mac or Linux? Ha. No one made games on those, so it wasn't an issue.

Uh...i know this is a venting thread, but i'm curious about what the problem is your running into?

I'm working through it over here...

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/659480-mingw-exe-not-a-valid-win32-application/

As far as the other problems, I needed to install the Windows SDK and then point the Eclipse include/lib paths to the correct include/lib folders. It has been a long time since I did any C++ from scratch.

It's a lot simpler if you just go download Visual Studio Express...

It's a lot simpler if you just go download Visual Studio Express...

I did that. Still had to find the SDK in a different place and add it by hand to Eclipse.

I have been working on training material for C++ beginners. What I didn't want was a bunch of different Appendix sections or some crazy decision tree. Use XCode for Mac, Visual Studio for Windows, or vim for Linux. Now lets link to a static library... Oh wait, I'll be answering questions for weeks about this.

So I settled on Eclipse because it's available and for everyone. Certainly not the best choice for any specific OS, but a good one for all three. I didn't count on still needing different C/C++ compilers/linkers/tools. I had hoped they would just work. Not a big deal, but just frustrating.

"Random," unidentified crashes are one of the reasons I seriously hate programming. Even now, I fear that one day, months or years from now, my program will start randomly crashing and it'll be too big to figure out what's wrong. Memory leak detection programs and Microsoft's solution didn't help last time this came up. I'm kind of shocked that Visual Studio doesn't realize that I declared variables twice.

Using Linux-focused tools on Windows make you a second-class citizen of both the Linux world and the Windows world. It puts us in a grey immigration zone where nobody acknowledges our existence.

Hopefully Clang will change the 'intentional difficulty' issue, but so far Clang hasn't exactly been too interested in Windows all that much either.

I did that. Still had to find the SDK in a different place and add it by hand to Eclipse.

That is really not what I meant by that. You are on Windows, use the bloody Windows tools. They don't bite (mostly).

Also, Eclipse has to be one of the absolute *worst* C++ IDEs, on *any* platform.