Setting up C++ in my computer…
So, at first I thought it would be really easy to download a program and install it… I’ve done that a couple of times but I turned out this time I was totally lost. Why? Let me tell you…
I opened Cygwin.com, where we were supposed to download the program, and start reading the instructions. Nothing to worry about until here but then I thought “I should read the FAQ’s just to know what could go wrong”. That was my biggest mistake. I clicked the FAQ’s link and around 103 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS appeared in front of me!!! 103!!! Most of them were question like “Where is glibe?” or ”Why is my .rhost file not recognized by rlogin anymore after updating to Cygwin 1.7.34?” I freaked out because half of the English words I was reading seemed to be part of a computerscientist slang completely unknown to me.
I read a few questions and it turns out you can kill your computer in several ways when you install Cygwin. I did some research on google but it really didn´t help me, the same computerscientist language kept appearing on every link I clicked.
Finally I decided I had to stop thinking in what could go wrong and YOLO… (Also the worst thing it could happen was that I had to delete around 17 gigas of Cygwin crap) I looked for a video on youtube.com (second mistake) and followed the instructions. The program was surprisingly slow to download since in the video the process looked pretty fast (although I was connected to a lame Wifi in that moment). I was worried of downloading 17 gigas of stuff I didn’t need.
To make this story shorter; Cygwin seemed to be installed but I spend the next week trying to figure out why it didn’t work properly. I tried to compile the “Hello World” thing and every time Cygwin would return an error: stddef.h not founded. The problem was that I have followed the youtube tutorial and installed some packages (now I know what a package is) which in some way blocked the C++ libraries (now I also know what a library is).
Now here is the good part: I had to figure out myself how to fix my Cygwin and I learned, maybe it sounds easy or not a big deal but believe me, when I compiled and ran my first code after one week of frustration it WAS A BIG DEAL!
Here is the video I watched but I totally don´t recommend it.
P.S.: Sorry if it’s too long.
WSQ01 by Octavio Rojas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.