Win32 odyssey: who needs documentation?
During my coding adventures, I have just found myself having to port an existing Win32 application to CMake. After writing a mere 283 lines CMakeLists.txt file, and getting the application successfully compile, I fired it up to see if it worked, of course. I found it failing when doing a WSAAsyncSelect, and failing there didn’t seem to make any sense. So, to get to the point, I decided I’d just carefully compare the compiler’s options generated from CMake with the ones that were in the original Visual Studio project file. After finding the difference, I decided I was gonna learn what those flags meant, so I googled for “visual c++ compiler flags” and guess what? Nothing useful. The right string to google would be “visual c++ compiler options”. But before getting to it, I had to unsuccessfully go thru “visual studio compiler options”. You’d think that would cut it, right? Since “visual c++ compiler options” did it. But, surpringly, “visual studio compiler flags” did actually find what I wanted. Interesting combination.
I don’t really feel like blaming Google on this. Reproducing the same search pattern in the internal Help function of Microsoft Visual Studio gave me the same success/no-success scheme. Besides, the whole point-and-click procedure is a terribly uncomfortable experience. Not only I have to get my hands off my keyboard (inherently a waste of time), but also do I have to (mind: have to) wander my mouse around for a while to get to the information.
So, I wondered, is there an alternative? I went to my rxvt terminal emulator (which I run through Cygwin, can’t really be bothered with using the native Windows Terminal), and tried to get some help from cl.exe. No luck. After some try-and-fail recursion, the least useless thing I would find was cl.exe -help which would give me 106 (one hundred and six!) lines of documentation. Wow, impressive, isn’t it? Comparing, gcc’s manual page is 7820 lines, as for the latest stable.