It’s not actually that hard to do, there’s just a few things that are different between C and Linux, specifically between MSVC and GCC /Clang.. I did this when I wrote the Asteroids game in the book.

Originally I developed it on Windows then moved it to Linux (Ubuntu) and then I added the bits to have it work on a Raspberry Pi. It worked on the Pi more or less as is on Ubuntu but I added support for game pad, detecting that it was on a Pi and displaying the temperature.

Here’s what I’ve found is different between MSVC and GCC/Clang.

1. The safe string functions. MSVC has the _s functions so instead of strcpy, there’s strcpy_s on MSVC. This doesn’t exists in GCC/Clang but there are similar functions with an n in the middle e.g. strncpy. In future I’ll create a macro for each function that uses the appropriate type so the compiler will pick the correct type.   However it seems even strncpy may not be all that safe. If there is no \0 in the n characters then the copied string won’t have a terminating \0 and thus could still blow up.  This article says that in order of safety it goes like this with strcpy least safe and strlcpy the most.

   strcpy < strncpy < snprintf < strlcpy

   so maybe I should be using strlcpy instead.

2. The include path for SDL in GCC/Clang is “SDL\SDL.h” not “SDL.h” as it is in MSVC. Again this could be fixed with a macro prefix for the SDL path so all #include works correctly on either system.

3.  I found that the file type was wrong. This wasn’t just a matter of CR/LF versus LF which you get between Windows and Linux (CR = Carriage return, LF = Line feed). Somehow the Windows file had a different UTF encoding type to what GCC/Clang expected and the compiler did not like it. However Visual Studio Code shows you what encoding it is (on the bottom of the edit window) and lets you change it, so no harm done. You may need to do this once on each file you’ve moved from Windows to Linux.

4. I found that the time header file in Linux needed a bit of work to make it compile. The standard for this dictates that differences aren’t done to the header file but by adding in additional headers.

So I’ll look into strlcpy.