Cygwin in Visual Studio

Question

I'm trying to port an old program I wrote for class from KDev in Ubuntu to Windows Visual Studio 2008 using Cygwin as a personal learning exercise. I have the include path configured to include C:\cygwin\usr\include but it doesn't read the .h files properly.

Namely I'm curious as to how one would go about using unix sockets.h functionality in a Visual Studio environment using Cygwin. Has anybody ever got this working or have an easier way to go about doing this?

Answer 1

This is an old question, but since it comes up first (for SO) on a Google search I wanted to share that it looks like the latest Visual Studio versions do support this.

For instructions, refer to this blog post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2017/07/19/using-mingw-and-cygwin-with-visual-cpp-and-open-folder/

Answer 2

Simply speaking, don't do that. It would be just waste of time. I tried it several times, but always failed. Mostly, I was frustrated by many linking errors, and also was unable to use VS as a debugger.

You can use Visual Studio for editing and browsing source code. It is nice because VS provides the best C/C++ intellisense features (e.g., Auto completion, fast go to definition/declaration). But, it is very hard to use cygwin tool chains with Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2008 is not designed to work with other tool chains. Specifically, you need to change (1) headers, (2) libraries, (3) compiler and (4) linker. However, it is generally very hard, or you need to trade off with the nice features of Visual Studio.

The strongest feature of Visual Studio is its debugging ability such as fully integrated debugging environment and very easy watch windows (e.g., you can see STL vector's element directly in watch windows). However, you can't do this if you would change fundamental tool chain (although I am very suspicious it is even possible to safely build with Visual Studio and cygwin tool chains).

Unfortunately, current Visual Studio 2008 is not for cygwin/MinGW.