w64devkit VS ArchWSL

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

You can download Arch Linux for WSL from a third-party source like WSL Arch Linux. Follow the instructions on the GitHub page to install it.

i have archwsl but honestly there are minimal problems on windows for me so I really don't bother using wsl over just dual booting

ArchWSL

Was Arch installed with yuk7/ArchWSL tool or something else?

Don't use it anymore but used it for a number of years after WSL came out. It involved some combination of https://github.com/yuk7/ArchWSL and Xming X. Worked great.

• If you live in the linux terminal, I recommend installing WSL with a distro you like (I use arch here btw).

It uses a customized version of the Linux kernel (repo) that integrates with the host Windows OS. You can build any distro on top of that kernel, as people have done with (of course) Arch. The distro isn't any less "real" than a distro that it run on QEMU (and with a level 1 hypervisor, all systems that uses one are technically virtualized already).