Microsoft_craziness.h (2018)
Something I always wondered about Visual Studio and Windows programming:<p>If you compile a C++ program with Visual Studio, it gets dynamic dependencies on some visual studio DLLs. DLLs that are not necessarily installed by default on the Windows of the target user you're compiling for.<p>So the question is: MS created both Windows and Visual Studio. So why can't Visual Studio compile to something that works by default on the Windows of the target audience without requiring them to install those additional DLLs? Doesn't the win32 API provide enough, and can't Visual Studio statically link in whatever extras it needs, or those extras be added to the Windows API that is present by default if they're that necessary?<p>Also, given that Windows comes with pre-installed programs that were written in C++, how did those programs get compiled to not require those Visual Studio dependencies, are MS not using Visual Studio themselves internally?