Member Discussions

I'm looking for a language that's easily ran on windows without having to change any source code, and also able to be ran on a shell online like a typical C mud. I would like a language similar to C, but that isn't really nessicary. Just some help on some of the window friendly languages would be greatly appreciated.

You could try Cygwin www.cygwin.com ), which will generally compile MUDs out of the box or with a small patch, or you could try Visual C++. Several MUDs have been ported to work with Visual C++. There are also other C compilers for Windows (lcc, mingw32, pelles), but I don't know of any MUDs that work with these.

I have Cygwin, but I've been told that when you work on something with Cygwin, then switch to a shell you have to change some definitions or something or another. I'm pretty new to coding muds, and my knowledge of C isn't all that great.

I really would rather use ROM, but SmaugFUSS is by far the easiest code to make the switch from cygwin to a shell. But...I don't even plan on releasing this mud I'm doing, I'm just trying to get down the C language. Eventually I'll get nakedMUD and start my real mud.

Moral to the story: What do I have to do to a code to get it to compile under both cygwin and then a shell?

(Thanks for replying)
- Solon

I've found that for the most part Cygwin works very well with linux programs. You need GCC and Make to compile ROM. If you just used the default packages, you should have gcc. I don't think make comes enabled by default, but it'll be under the devel packages. You'll probably want to read up on using Linux as well.

Can you use GCC on windows? Because switching to linux isn't quite the answer I was looking for. I could once I got a new computer, but that's down the road. Other people besides me use this computer, so I don't want to make them use linux too, (and they probably wouldn't let me anyway :P)

- Solon

Cygwin comes with GCC & make. That's the point of Cygwin. You can rebuild Linux programs to work on Windows without actually using Linux. I recommended reading up on Linux because Cygwin works somewhat like Linux.

Taking a look at MinGW might be worth a shot, as it is (well, originally was) a fork of Cygwin. It has native GCC (ie, no POSIX compatability layer needed - it actually makes .exes), but no make utility. I can't speak for how good it actually is, as my C knowledge is -very- sub-par.

Just what does a makefile do, anyway... *duck*

"Cygwin comes with GCC & make"

Unless they've changed their defaults, those are in the Development options and are *not* installed by default when you do a Cygwin install. You have to manually select to install them the last time I update Cygwin.

From http://www.gnu.org/software/make

Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.
Make gets its knowledge of how to build your program from a file called the makefile, which lists each of the non-source files and how to compute it from other files. When you write a program, you should write a makefile for it, so that it is possible to use Make to build and install the program.

Also, Drey is right, you will have to enable these when you install it.