genesis-sdl VS w64devkit

As for static linking libraries, I solved this by writing a CMake file to build my dependencies from source (including SDL). Works in Visual Studio and in Linux/GCC. Should work in MSYS2 as well though I haven't tested that: https://github.com/weirddan455/genesis-sdl/blob/main/CMakeLists.txt

Try w64devkit https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

Click "View raw" to download. The executable is just ~3kB. If you'd like to try building it yourself, I distribute a Windows XP-friendly, no-installation-required C and C++ toolchain, w64devkit. The 32-bit toolchains are labeled "i686" (on the right under "Releases"). The build command (cc ...) is at the top of the source file.

I bundle my preferred tools together in a standalone compiler toolkit for Windows: w64devkit. Except Git and documentation (see the links in the README), that's essentially everything I need to be productive.

I have a Dockerfile here that goes through all the steps bootstrapping a Mingw-w64 toolchain from source: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

FWIW, both GNU objcopy and GNU ld (including e.g. the XCOPY-deployable ones from w64devkit[1]) are perfectly capable[2] of turning binary data into MSVC-acceptable COFF files with start and end symbols, while Free Pascal, for example, straight up ships with a bin2obj tool; the MSVC toolset is the outlier here.

[1] https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

[2] https://www.devever.net/~hl/incbin

Sounds like an high priority issue to solve first. I distribute a toolchain that doesn't require installation and includes a debugger: w64devkit (see "Releases"). You can pluck out the gdb.exe since it's statically linked and doesn't depend on anything else in the kit.

This particular case is a Windows program due to Winsock, and I happen to include all the above tools, except SDL2, a small Mingw-w64 distribution, w64devkit. So it doesn't take much!

Similar project providing slightly fewer tools: https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit