There is something fundamentally wrong with Windows or Visual Studio that it requires ugly solutions.

▲ flohofwoe 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ok, then just cl.exe instead of gcc or clang. Completely different set of command line options from gcc and clang, but that's fine. C/C++ build tooling needs to be able to deal with different toolchains. The diversity of C/C++ toolchains is a strength, not a weakness :)

One nice feature of MSVC is that you can describe the linker dependencies in the source files (via #pragma comment(lib, ...)), this enables building fairly complex single-file tools trivially without a build system like this:

   cl mytool.c

...without having to specify system dependencies like kernel32 etc... on the cmdline.

▲ delta_p_delta_x 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Windows and Visual Studio solutions are perfectly fine. MSBuild is a declarative build syntax in XML, it's not very different from a makefile.

	▲	uecker 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		XML is already terrible. But the main problem seems to be that they created something similar but incompatible to make.