GNU Make works fine on Windows. The sources come with a vcproj to build it natively, or you get it from ezwinports. At my dayjob, we have a pretty complicated build with GNU Make for cross-compiling our application to Arm and PowerPC, and it works on Windows, even with special Guile scripts to reduce the number of shell calls which are extremely slow on Windows.
VBScript works better on Windows, IMO. Also works out of the box on all Windows versions since at least 2000 (on Win9x it was shipped with IE).
Not really... not since XP, anyway. Unless you have a space in your username (which is a terrible idea for many other reasons), your "Documents" path is C:\Users\JohnSmith\Documents. "Program Files" is pretty much the only important path which is likely to have spaces, and your makefiles (hopefully!) don't need to touch that.
For a software to work fine on Windows, it must support spaces in files and paths. Also Unicode in files and paths.
VBScript does, GNU Make doesn't.
> which is a terrible idea for many other reasons
If you use make to setup stuff, it's very possible you'll need to access "c:\Users\All Users" which does contain space in username. Also "c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files" which contain more than one.
DOCUME~1 Documents
or
<SYMLINKD> ALLUSE~1 All Users [C:\ProgramData]
That is entirely correct and really the most glaring downside of Make. In my opinion: If you have spaces in your dependency names, just stay away from Make as far as possible.
I’ve just installed Visual C++ 6.0 Professional on a WinXP VmWare machine. Took less than a minute, BTW — modern SSDs are awesome. The default installation path under program files also contain spaces, it’s "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98"
BTW, they have a bug even on the very first welcome screen: http://const.me/tmp/vc6.png
>ezwinports
Interesting, hadn't run into this before. What's the advantage over MSYS2?