I've built a load of utilities that do that just fine. I use vim as an editor.
The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though. see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/visualstudio/releases/2022... - you should use these if you are not a single developer and have to collaborate with people. Back like in the old days when we had pinned versions of the toolchain across whole company.
> The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though.
You only get access to the LTSC channel if you have a license for at least Visual Studio Professional (Community won't do it); so a lot of hobbyist programmers and students are not aware of it.
On the other hand, its existence is in my experience very well-known among people who use Visual Studio for work at some company.
That's not correct. You don't have to give your credit card details or even be logged in but you are still required to have any Visual Studio license. For hobbyists and startups the VS Community license is enough but larger companies need a VS Professional license even for the VS Build Tools.
How strict Microsoft is with enforcement of this license is another story.
You do not need a Professional or Enterprise license to use the Visual Studio Build Tools:
> Previously, if the application you were developing was not OSS, installing VSBT was permitted only if you had a valid Visual Studio license (e.g., Visual Studio Community or higher).
The license doesn't actually permit OSS development. Only compilation of near-unmodified third party OSS libraries.
You may not compile OSS software developed by your own organisation.
The OSS software must be unmodified, "except, and only to the extent, minor modifications are necessary so that the Open Source Dependencies can be compiled and built with the software."
Using VS build tools for open source development is covered by the Community licence [0], separate from this Build Tools licence change. That license is more open than you might expect, working as an individual it even permits proprietary development for commercial purposes.
Under that usage, the Community license counts as a valid Visual Studio license for Build Tools purposes, hence the second paragraph:
> This change expands user rights to the Build Tools and does not limit the existing Visual Studio Community license provisions around Open-Source development. If you already are a developer contributing to OSS projects, you can continue to use Visual Studio and Visual Studio Build Tools together for free, just like before.
That just confirms the parent comment's point. If you're just using the build tools directly, you're fine. If need to develop "with Visual Studio" i.e. the IDE, not just the command line tools, then you need the paid license.
It's actually not. It's complicated, but they're explicitly allowing Build Tools to be used to compile open source dependencies of closed source projects that do not need the MSVC toolchain for proprietary components.
It's why the example they give in the article is a Node.js application with native open source dependencies (e.g. sqlite3).
EDIT: it's clearer when read in context of the opening paragraph:
> Visual Studio Build Tools (VSBT) can now be used for compiling open-source C++ dependencies from source without requiring a Visual Studio license, even when you are working for an enterprise on a commercial or closed-source project.
I wish the post was clearer (though I'm not sure what that looks like). I've made the same mistake interpreting it, then had to go back and reread it a few times.
Well, let's say this is the world view of all companies about open-source software. Then what happens. If people "tend to not give crap" about licenses, all the nice guarantees of GPL etc also disappear.
GPL was made in response to restrictive commercial licensing. Yes is uses the same legal document (a license): but is made in response!
So is propriety seizes to exist, then it's not a problem GPL also seizes to exist.
Also: it's quite obvious to me that IP-law nowadays too much. It may have been a good idea at first, but now it's a monster (and people seem to die because of it: Aaron Swartz and Suchir Balaji come to mind).
There are zero guarantees and commercial software uses GPLd software as parts of their products all the time. Licenses do not work and you shouldn't respect them whenever you can.
The Visual Studio Build Tools are installable with winget (`winget search buildtools`).
There are licensing constraints, IANL but essentially you need a pro+ license on the account if you're going to use it to build commercial software or in a business environment.
I worked with VC++ 6.0 up until Windows 11 when it really, really wouldn't run any more, then switched to VS 2008. The code is portable across multiple systems so it didn't really matter which version of VS it's developed with, and VC++ 6.0 would load, build the project, and have it ready to run while VS 2022 was still struggling through its startup process.
VS 2008 is starting to show the elephantine... no, continental land-mass bloat that VS is currently at, and has a number of annoying bugs, but it's still vastly better than anything after about VS 2012. And the cool thing is that MS can'tfuckwithitanymore. When I fire up VS tomorrow it'll be the exact same VS I used today, not with half a dozen features broken, moved around, gone without a trace, ...
VS2026 is even worse. And if you thought the CoPilot enshittification in 2022 was bad, wait'll you see 2026. We only use it for final builds now, so develop under a bloated but at least not enshittified yet version, then do release builds and testing with whatever the latest version is before shipping.
They've completely reworked release plans. 2026 LTSC will come out a year after the initial VS 2026 release (at the same time as VS 2027) and be supported for 1 more year. You pretty much have to get on the rolling updates train for the IDE, which is why the C++ toolchain now follows a different schedule and you're supposed to be able to install any specific toolchain side by side.
The Visual Studio toolchain does have LTSC and stable releases - no one seems to know about them though. see: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/visualstudio/releases/2022... - you should use these if you are not a single developer and have to collaborate with people. Back like in the old days when we had pinned versions of the toolchain across whole company.
[1] https://download.visualstudio.microsoft.com/download/pr/5d23...