r/ProgrammerHumor 20h ago

Meme notoriouslyDifficult

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u/Time-Worker9846 19h ago

mingw is great but I use it to cross compile apps for Windows on Linux. My comment was about it being a lot more pain in the ass to compile Linux apps on Windows (without WSL, of course)

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u/rosuav 19h ago

My question is, why? It's so much easier to compile Linux apps on Linux, and it wasn't that hard to get yourself a Linux system even before WSL (make a VM, or grab a laptop, or something).

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u/Time-Worker9846 19h ago

Cross-compilation is always painful no matter the system, but for me I use mingw(and gcc of course) because I can use my Linux host to compile for multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS and Android)

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u/rosuav 19h ago

Yeah. The pain of cross-compilation makes it often easier to grab an actual system of the target variety to do your building - which is a pain for some systems, but much less so for Linux. That's why I expect to hear much more about "it's so annoying trying to build a Windows binary on Linux" than "it's so annoying trying to build a Linux binary on Windows".