good points

Posted Apr 3, 2016 19:12 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: good points by jem
Parent article: Ubuntu on Windows

Before that, the libraries were distributed with Visual Studio and were not compatible with each other.

They were compatible where that counted: all versions were included and maintained as part of the OS.

This is why third party libraries for Windows are offered in a large number of variants depending on which vesion of Visual Studio they are intended to be linked with: VS 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, etc...

Sure, but that only affects developers. For a long time developers have faced a dilemma: develop for Linux (easy peasy lemon squeezy) then find out that you have no way to distribute your stuff to users (no way to produce binaries and deliver them to users and minuscule distributions are trying to impose insane demands on you) or develop for Windows (really hard, you need to pay $$ to get good instruments and many things are just plain out painful to do) then distribute result easily.

Developers have endured great pains because stability of target platform is more important than stability and usability of development platform.

Now with MacOS/iOS and Android situation is changing. No longer Windows is the only game in town! Development tools for these new platforms are not as great yet but they are going there - and in both cases billions of users are there too. What's not to like? Microsoft feels the heat, apparently.

good points

Posted Apr 4, 2016 14:20 UTC (Mon) by rghetta (subscriber, #39444) [Link]

> They were compatible where that counted: all versions were included and maintained as part of the OS.

This is not correct.
If your application is linked to a Visual C++ runtime DLL, you need to bundle the dll with your executable (by including the MSVC Redistributable Runtime installer), the SO itself doesn't include it.