setting up luarocks on Windows is pure pain T_T

I’m pretty sure everything is working now, except it’s trying to use MSVC to compile things instead of MinGW and I get a cryptic ld error and ugh. I’ll figure that out tomorrow

anyway I submitted a github issue basically saying “hey this literally doesn’t work at all please help?” and hopefully someone will

of course the problem is with C compilation, because C compilation is one of the worst things to ever be inflicted on a computer

makefiles are the result of a drunken dare to make a programming environment worse than a shell script

@kasdeya lol your takes are getting 🌶️

@kasdeya for the record I develop almost entirely in Visual Studio so basically any script-based build system seems needlessly-painful to me

@pork_soda that totally makes sense tbh. thankfully I’ve almost never had to work with compiled languages. I say “thankfully” because everything about compilation seems extremely painful to me lol. although makefiles definitely seem like the worst example because they are every bit as un-portable as a shell script but they also have even more terrible legacy behavior heaped on top

@kasdeya AFAIK CMAKE is supposed to be quasi-portable, but I am still a neophyte at it. One product I develop for my day-job gets cross-compiled to a Unix-based environment so I have some limited familiarity with Make.

@kasdeya my day job work is very performance-sensitive so it’s almost all compiled code. I personally love the challenge of it and the power and interoperability of developing your own C API libraries

@kasdeya if it’s an option and you want to dabble w/ compiled code, give Visual Studio’s free edition a try. It’s really very good as long as you’re developing for windows

@pork_soda ooh that’s tempting! to be honest I have this irrational dislike of auto-generated code or auto-generated config files unless I know exactly what they’re doing, and from what I understand that’s how VIsual Studio works, right? but it does sound like it’s a much nicer environment for compiling things than having to figure all of that out by hand

although I have thought about trying a compiled language. in the past I tried Rust and was extremely confused and overwhelmed by it lol. it was my first statically-typed language as well as my first real attempt at learning a compiled language and I think that was a mistake. I did manage to make a pretty cool project in Rust but I barely understood any of the compiler errors I was getting and developed superstitions about how to not anger the compiler lol

so I’ve been thinking of trying something less advanced, though I’m not totally sure what yet. but right now I’m currently wrestling with both Löve/Lua and potentially learning Fennel (a Lisp-like that transpiles into Lua) so I definitely have my hands full as it is

I gave up and just set everything up in WSL lol. and of course everything worked perfectly there with no effort at all

it’s weird how some languages work perfectly on Windows and others are basically only usable on Linux

I can’t wait until Linux is as easy to use as Windows and I never have to deal with this kind of platform compatibility problem again. also I bet Windows support is a massive headache for FOSS devs anyway

@kasdeya and with WSL support from MS there has never been a greater incentive to just develop for Linux and call it a day, since Linux stuff can be used from Windows via WSL just perfectly. It is actually Linux, after all.

@kasdeya yeah VS’ build settings are all managed via dropdown menus that get saved into xml-formatted files that are rev-control friendly. My only experience with Rust is by documentation and hype articles, but if it’s giving you grief maybe try C? It’s a relatively simple language but also foundational to a lot of modern software, and if you get comfy in C you can always start sprinkling in C++ concepts as you gain proficiency

@kasdeya it is unbelievably annoying. bless all the FOSS devs that put the effort to provide good support for windows users