Why doesn't cc -ansi disable conflicting type for getline from stdio.h?

[Norman Gray]

Greetings.

On 16 Jun 2021, at 23:06, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

>> You're thinking of WSL (Windows System for Linux).
>
> Yes, apparently.  (I'm reading the Wikipedia page on that now.  Thanks
> for giving me the name of the thing, so that I could google it.)
>
> I'm sure that this "WSL 2" thing is swell for some projects, but
> for me personally it just looks like more lipstick on the pig.

Apropos of not very much, I'll chip in at this point to say that WSL2 is 
interestingly and unexpectedly good, in an 'it just works' sense.

Example 1: I recently taught an 'Introduction to unix tools' course, 
with a mixed-OS class.  Unlike WSL1 or (OMG) cygnus in previous years, 
once the WSL2 students had been shown how to enable WSL2 on their 
Windows machines (admittedly not trivial in every case), they were 
officially No Problem, being less of a drain on lab demonstrator time 
than the students with random Linux distributions.

Example 2: In a recent project, I was collaborating with a firmly 
Windows-based colleague on an Arduino project, where the build toolchain 
used slightly fragile Makefiles invoking (on their machine, via WSL2) 
the Windows install of the Arduino cross-compilers.  This turned out to 
be massively less of a problem than I expected it to be.  It's not 
bulletproof, and there's non-zero scope for filesystem-confusion -- at 
one point, if I recall correctly, the Makefile and the compiler turned 
out to have different ideas about what 'the home directory' was, and 
where ../ went from there (oooh, the hilarity) -- but these were at the 
level of unix-to-unix porting problems, rather than anything more 
hair-pullingly entertaining.

I think it's possible to get X running on WSL2, but that's only for 
masochists.  MS are not going to help you with that at all.  It all ends 
up feeling agreeably old-skool.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/it/
Research IT Coordinator
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
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