On Wednesday, 25 October 2017 at 16:05:48 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
In preparation for an upcoming blog series, and partly as a
reaction to the "Windows is a second-class citizen" criticisms
that have been cropping up lately, I've put together a primer
on getting set up to use C and D together on Windows. It
includes some background on why we need to install the MS
toolchain to produce 64-bit binaries.
The blog:
https://dlang.org/blog/2017/10/25/dmd-windows-and-c/
Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/78olka/dmd_windows_and_c_getting_set_up_to_use_d_and_c/
LLVM's LLD is another option for linking on Windows (and
cross-linking to Windows from other platforms); they used not to
support debuginfos (.pdb), not sure what the current state is.
`lld-link.exe` and `llvm-lib.exe` work as drop-in replacements,
reading the same environment variables and exposing the same
command-line interface.
Recent LDC integrates both the linker and the archiver/librarian
(in the LDC executable directly - increasing the size of the LDC
executable by about 10% IIRC).
The MS libs are obviously still required. They can be compressed
to ~32 MB. The redistribution of the static libs is unclear,
that's why I haven't pursued this further, but that's basically
the only thing standing in the way of releasing a fully
self-contained LDC package with a compressed size of roughly 50
MB (64-bit libs only).
See
https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/pull/2142#issuecomment-304472412.
