w64devkit VS busybox-w32

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

Even in environments such as win32, we have https://frippery.org/busybox/ that is just fucking awesome. Staying the size below an 1mb while being extremely fast. Unlike the shitty python package which has 40mb archive size and leave breadcrumbs for me to cleanup all over my filesystem.

Win32 port is here: https://frippery.org/busybox/

Look into busybox for windows https://frippery.org/busybox/. Pretty bad ass even with it’s downsides of missing applets and such

Vim by itself means no supporting unix environment. It's useful to call out to powerful external tools not present by default on Windows. I fill that gap with busybox-w32. It's not a big deal once solved.

Sure, it's not necessary, but a few simple, nice tools (<600kiB for an entire suite of extended unix utilities) makes thing a whole lot simpler on a platform devoid of nice tools.

To operate on many files you'll need better tools than what Windows gives you. One option is busybox-w32 (important caveat: doesn't support unicode paths), which will get you some basic command line tools. For example, to gzip compress every file under the current directory, including subdirectories (leaving the originals behind with -k):

busybox-w32 includes a cal applet. If that's all you care about, you can just rename busybox.exe to cal.exe.

busybox-w32: standard unix utilities for Windows. It's a BusyBox port.

IHMO, even better is to just use POSIX sh in your Makefile and simply make it a build requirement. It's easy to obtain a reasonable sh even on Windows (Cygwin, MSYS2, busybox-w32), and to further support exactly this I include sh alongside make in my development kit distribution. This uniformity lets me hit all operating systems with the same Makefile. I use EXE from the environment to determine the binary file extension, if any.