Convince your employer to ship a half decent unix environment with its OS and it will run on windows too. It's mostly a choice by microsoft to ship a half-baked command line interface with its products, you can't blame google for that.
I'm a Microsoft fanboy and Powershell is bad Python.
How 'bout we meet in the middle and y'all make the changes the Cygwin guys need? And hey, where'd that POSIX subsystem go? Finally got C99 support almost shipped now how 'bout you reverse that other horrible decision, too?
I just want to boost big time for Cygwin, it really is amazing how much it improves the experience of using a Windows computer. It gives me the tools I want/need (gcc and python) and the programs I write run without modification in Cygwin, Linux and OS X!
Also, the default terminal emulator that comes with Cygwin, called MinTTY, is fantastic. It doesn't have the flashy features of many native Linux clients, but it has all the basic features one could want (full color support, nice fonts, very durable, no 'gotchas').
The only problem is that support outside of C-based languages is touch-and-go. Mainline Python works flawlessly since it's implemented in C, and all it's tools also work flawlessly (virtualenv, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, django, flask, etc), but other languages like Go or Rust don't really support Cygwin. I'm unaware how well other languages are supported (e.g. Ruby).
So Cygwin will definitely "give you that Unix feeling" on a Windows machine, but it can't always replace a virtual machine.
Whenever I'm stuck on Windows, Cygwin is essential. (I use ssh from the Cygwin terminal.)
It's also great in production - tolerable command-line remote administration, and great for e.g. Nagios plugins that are bash scripts (vastly better than attempting to find a Windows-native plugin that someone else wrote).
Not really sure why this is getting downvoted - it's kind of an important detail when choosing a build system if you have to do multiplatform deployment.
I didn't downvote him but it sounds like "he's driving angry". He does work for that "evil" company in Redmond. :-). Maybe he can help make F# a great cross-platform language and increase the goodwill? Microsoft did an incredible job with F# but it really only runs well on Windows.
If he works for MS he has zero right to even be mildly annoyed, since we have for decades been living in a world where "only runs on Windows" isn't even in the small print.
I've run into some (but def. not all) current and former MS folks who carry this ironic shoulder-chip. One such indignantly complained about a major open-source project's janky Windows support something like "well, that's just because they choose not to support the platform!"
I found this really interesting, as after a bit of conversation, the speaker was clearly unaware of how MS' technical and business models around Windows have impeded open source work. A for-pay operating system with a profit-center development toolchain presents a very large barrier to Unix-centric OSS projects. Not to mention the numerous technical impedance mismatches between the $unix and Windows worlds. (And these days we have tools like libuv to help with that, but still.)
What particular problems on non-Windows do you have with F#? I've been running F# applications in telecom, in production, on Mono, for several years.
F# doesn't really seem to be the factor there at all, it's just general .NET support. In fact, F# can do a bit better than C#, as F# actually includes a static linker.
I guess it's the same with any new product or language: when there are a lot more great testimonials than cries of pain, then it's actually safe to use that product.
Those complaints mostly seem to be about the developer experience on Mac, which, yeah might suck. I use VS + vim, build on Windows, then copy over to Linux for deployment.
The biggest issue is with complicated frameworks, like ASP.NET, since there could be all sorts of runtime things missing. Fortunately with MS's new open source kick, this should be a thing of the past relatively soon,
So, you just told me to buy a Windows machine. Kind of funny because our little subthread started because the Microsoft F# developer didn't want to be told to buy a Linux or Mac.
The world we're all looking for is one where we'd all like to mix and match our software as much as possible, and not be told to buy a different computer.
I didn't say they weren't. I imagine the project needs lots of help. Is there an ETA? Will the ports be kept in sync with the Windows versions so we don't need to wait years for updates? It's a lot of work.
I think their goal was a year for everything under .Net to get ported but I don't know off hand. You can already use it via Mono if you wanted to play with it today.
> Will the ports be kept in sync with the Windows versions so we don't need to wait years for updates?
It's all being opened sourced. Every week Microsoft open sources more of their .Net platform and language tools. It will be compilable on all platforms. So yes.
s/not running Windows/not running Windows or refusing to install a free VM/
5 or 6 years ago I had to have Windows to run CAD software, but I found it easier to have a virtualbox install w/ Ubuntu in it for software development than trying to write code on Windows. The performance was good enough an the usability was pretty good. I imagine it has only gotten better since then.
One company I work with has a firewall of a certain brand. It only works with windows or a mac, you can't connect to it from a command line it needs some stupid app that you download and install just to make a VPN connection.
Not having a unix specific build system work on windows seems to be pretty much the expected behaviour. As opposed to a firewall that runs linux internally requiring windows or OS/X to talk to it...
I struggled with Cisco AnyConnect's linux client until I eventually found the open-source OpenConnect replacement. The Cisco website even detected that I ran linux and offered the linux client for download, whereupon it dutifully pushed the Windows client... The crappy linux client I did have had to come from our cloud vendor.
