2025-05-13--New-Blood-Bittersweet

Umfeld now runs on Windows … and it feels a bit dirty.

somehow, i never cared about porting Umfeld … but then i looked into those eyes … and felt sorry.

i don’t want to start a discussion but for me Windows is such a nasty environment for developers and getting Umfeld to compile was a bit of a pain. this included WEIRD glitches in the tesselation library, a bizzar absence of the weak attribute1, and a compiler toolchain that can only be described as frankenstein-esque. no offense dear people from MinGW you are doing an AMAZING job, but it feels so much less complete, coherent and wanted than developing e.g on Ubuntu or macOS.

well, Umfeld works now more or less on Windows … with a few glitches and inconsistencies. at least SDL3 seems to be pretty solid! let’s see where this all goes … welcome Windows.

  1. this is actually a longer story and took me quite a while to figure out. long story short: MSVC the main compiler for Windows does not support the weak attribute at all i.e there is no way to replicate the overriding of functions as used in Processing ( e.g keyPressed() ). MinGW understands the weak attribute, well, a little bit, but does not AT ALL behave the same way as it does in GCC or Clang. check out UmfeldCallbacks for a working example. ↩