Final compilation and third-party software.

[Spoiledpay]

When compiling, I noticed that we have to install the visual build tools, so use cl.exe to compile our code into an executable. Is there another way? Can we use GCC or Clang and TCC?

Do we have the option to have a final build without these compilers?

And another way or a bootstrap to generate the .exe. And the question of winexe, is there this possibility when there is a working example of Windows GUI?

Thank you for your help.

[brombres]

It seems you're hoping for a language that can generate Windows executables without needing Visual Studio.

Rogue cross-compiles to C (or C++ or ObjC), so the question becomes: are there ways to compile C into Windows exe's without using VS? I believe it's possible with a compiler like Clang but you'd still need a copy of the Windows development libraries that come with Visual Studio. Here's a post about using Clang to compile Windows on OSX; similar principles should apply on Windows: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23256554/135791. I doubt that getting it working would be simple and easy.

Rogue doesn't have any libraries that directly support Windows GUI programming but it's fairly easy to make Windows API calls from Rogue. It doesn't make the Windows API any easier to use, but you could, for example, do complex string manipulations or graphics generation in Rogue and then update the UI using Windows calls. I could create a little example if you're still interested.