On Wednesday, 12 August 2015 at 13:32:10 UTC, kink wrote:
Afaik DMD for Win64 requires the MS linker, so good luck without Visual Studio then. Same goes for LDC on Win64, although an LLVM COFF linker is under development. Serious system programming on Windows without MSVC and its C runtime? Not really an option; MinGW appears to be a dead end and never really fitted the Windows eco-system.
Well I'm not sure what percent "serious system programming" is done by other people, but I don't do any. I'll take your word that the MS linker is required.
Regardless, my point is more about the importance of a seamless installation on Windows than necessarily about what is required or not.
It is easy to get started with DMD on Windows, roughly equivalent to python or R (what I more commonly program in). This makes it easy for people to get started learning D and playing around with RDMD. That's a good thing. By contrast, it seems quite complicated to get LDC or GDC working on Windows. I see explanations of how to build from source. There also appears to be a binary on the github page, but I haven't gotten it working (I didn't exactly try that hard though). I just hope that if DMD is replaced or moved to using LLVM, then care is taken to ensure that installation remains as simple as it currently is.
This isn't unique to D. I just tried to install the Clang Windows binary and I got a message about MSVC integration failing. I have Visual Express 2008, so I figure maybe a newer version is required, but it doesn't say anywhere on the download page what version is required (the building page says VS 2013 is, but shouldn't the download page clearly explain that?). Moreover, it doesn't bring up any kind of option for me to download and install what is missing.
I would consider the installation of Lyx to be a good example of a seamless installation. Lyx requires MiKTeX, so if it detects it's missing during installation, then it will download it. It might also update your version of MiKTeX also.
