alt Hacker News> the purity of "working with what's installed".
Oh, a kindred spirit!
I too absolutely love the notion of the base install, and what can be done just by means of its already available toolset.
(Fun tidbit: Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?)
Replies
Not having one’s configuration present is kneecapping yourself needlessly.
If you’re going to have a custom config, you might as well have a custom executable.
> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain
Shh, please. If MS find out, they'll add a parrot to "improve" it.
I played with the preinstalled languages in windows before, but the legacy stuff dizzied me before llms existed.
now that llms exist I am learning with dotnet, that now comes with windows, (or at least it comes with winget, and you can install a lot of kosher software, which is almost as good as having it preinstalled.)
If I ever hop onto an older machine I'll use the gpt to see what I get, i recall there's vbscript, apparently a .net compiler+runtime, and I saw a js interpreter in very old OS too.
A big inspiration in this realm is FogBugz historical "Wasabi". Their idea of compiling to PHP and c# i think it was, because it's what most OS come with, and their corpo clients can use it as it. It's in a joel spolsky blog post somewhere.
> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?
Even with MSBuild 4. From the days when .NET Framework was an OS component and also the build tools (until Roslyn) were part of the Framework.