I originally created Asteroids for Windows using Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition. Since then I’ve started the Clang version on Ubuntu and there haven’t been too many differences but there are just a few so in this post I’ll list what I’ve found so far.

Include Paths

On Windows, I was able to get away with #include <SDL.h> but on Linux, I’ve had to include the path so it’s #include <SDL2/SDL.h>. This was probably because I included the full path in the MSVC configuration.

Link Failures

The asteroids.c code in chapter 29 uses sin and cos for the first time and the linker was unhappy with that. So in tasks.json, I’ve explicitly had to add it into args, along with SDL2 and SDL2_image,

            "args": [
                "-g",
                "${file}","${workspaceFolder}/Asteroids/hr_time.c",
                "-o",
                "${fileDirname}/asteroids",                
                "-lSDL2",
                "-lSDL2_image",
                "-lm"
            ],

That “-lm” does that for maths.

Safe functions

Microsoft has its own set of safe functions many with an _s and extra length parameter.

On Linux, there don’t seem to be so many.

So sprintf_s on Windows becomes snprintf.

fopen_s just becomes standard fopen

linux/time.h

As well as time.h in the includes, I needed to add linux/time.h as well.