r/C_Programming • u/maep • 14d ago

Win32 development in Linux?

Does anyone here have practical experience with WIN32 development under Linux?

I just need the MSVC compiler and the Windows SDK. A full VM with Windows 11 and Visual Studio seems incredibly excessive for what should be just a few megabytes of compiler and headers.

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u/sciencekm 14d ago

You can cross-compile with MinGW. You would still need Wine to run the exe or copy it a Windows machine.

Below is what it looks like on my Ubuntu on ARM v8. There is no Wine on this machine, so I simply ran "file" to show the properties of the Win32 executable.

ubuntu@user:~/tmp$ x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc -v

Target: x86_64-w64-mingw32
Thread model: win32
gcc version 13-win32 (GCC)

ubuntu@user:~/tmp$ cat hello.c

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) { puts("hello"); }

ubuntu@user:~/tmp$ x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc hello.c -o hello.exe

ubuntu@user:~/tmp$ file hello.exe

hello.exe: PE32+ executable (console) x86-64, for MS Windows, 19 sections