w64devkit VS scratch

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

pbmview, an image viewer (windows subsystem).

For comparison (for those following along): https://github.com/skeeto/scratch/blob/master/parsers/qoi.c https://github.com/skeeto/scratch/blob/master/parsers/ini.c

Another option I learned a couple years ago is embedding a UTF-8 manifest ([details])[https://github.com/skeeto/scratch/tree/master/libwinsane]. Also put the console in UTF-8 mode (SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8)), and you're done. Works on Windows 10 and later. This covers everything: argv is UTF-8 and fopen accepts UTF-8 paths. (This is exactly how CRTs should have worked all along.)

I was thinking more about this and I realized it's quite easy to do it in arbitrary precision, so here's my take: https://github.com/skeeto/scratch/blob/master/misc/bswap.c

As was linked from my QOI article, here's my full decoder with comments: qoi.c. Each pixel decodes to a 32-bit integer, ABGR. That corresponds to SDL's SDL_PIXELFORMAT_ABGR8888. SDL_UpdateTexture copies that data into the texture's internal storage, and font is no longer needed. (In a real program I'd allocate it in a scratch arena, reset after initialization.)

A recent, interesting experience with function+context allocation: For more than a decade, Windows accidentally exposed part of zlib in a public DLL, and (overly-)clever applications can exploit this as a "system zlib." Though it doesn't export the "end" functions, so cleanup seems impossible. However, custom allocation works, so doesn't matter. I plugged it into an arena.