The following is a copy of my Patreon post here: 2 SDL Build Systems | Chastity White Rose Programming on Patreon

This is pretty big news for my programming progress. 

I updated my Microsoft and W64devkit build scripts for Windows. They both are batch scripts which set up the paths, compile an SDL program, and then run the program.

The only difference is that one of them uses GCC as part of the W64devkit environment I have installed, and the other uses the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler.

And now the scripts both set the correct path for where the "SDL2.dll" is located. This means that I don't have to copy it over to the current project directory I am compiling at the moment. I only need include it when publishing the program.

I am attaching both of these scripts to this post. Although non programmers won't have much of a clue what I'm talking about, veterans of compiling C and C++ programs will probably appreciate these scripts as they can be modified only slightly depending on where you install your include and library files for SDL.

This is pretty major news for me because although I have compiled my programs the Linux way with GCC, I never have been able to use Visual Studio or any product from Microsoft to compile my programs reliably without the IDE crashing. This new method makes use of the "Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022" script that is installed along with Visual Studio. This means I can compile programs on Windows with the Microsoft compiler and linker without having to navigate menus in the IDE that I have never figured out.

Will I ever actually release games compiled with the Microsoft compiler? Hell no! I prefer the Linux way that uses only open source software. But I did this for a personal challenge and also to help the programming community. I had to do a lot of Google searching to figure out how to even use the "cl" compiler. But now I am proud of the achievement of figuring out something that has been bothering me for years.