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That I don’t know Windows well is certainly a factor, but I think it’s at most 40% of the problem. Several notable issues, not all: - Competing msvc and gnu toolchains and ABIs, with native and Windows-first dependencies working better or exclusively with msvc, and *ix-first dependencies working better or exclusively with gnu, is a uniquely Windows situation. Which is which for a given build is also not clearly labeled most of the time. (You might mention glibc vs musl, but there’s basically nothing uniquely musl, and when you’re compiling for musl you can almost always get/compile everything for musl from the ground up.) - Confusing coexistence of x86 and x64 is another thing largely unique to Windows. (amd64 and arm64 are much more clearly separated in Apple land.) - Package management is a complete mess. Choco, scoop, win-get, nuget, vcpkg, ad hoc msi, ad hoc exe installer, ad hoc zip, etc. etc. There’s no pkg-config telling you where to look and which compiler flags to use. If you want to pick up a user-installed dep, you special case everything (e.g. looking in vcpkg path) and/or ask user to supply the search path(s) in env var(s). Anyway, shit mostly(tm) just work(tm) on *ix if you follow the happy path. There’s no happy path on Windows more often than not. |