On Wednesday, 12 August 2015 at 14:57:17 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
Well I'm not sure what percent "serious system programming" is done by other people, but I don't do any.
I understand your points. I meant to say that D is a system programming language (too), so it's tightly coupled to some internals of the OS. And Windows being a proprietary OS, Visual Studio or more precisely at least its runtime is likely to be required in the future as well.
Almost ;) proper support for Win64 in LDC is about to be completed with the next release. It will most likely require Visual Studio 2015. But that's about it, you'll just need to extract an LDC archive. When invoking ldc2.exe, you'll need to make sure some environment variables are properly set up (e.g., by using a Visual Studio command prompt), for it to find the linker, libs etc.
Last time I built clang (from source, using Visual Studio) I was amazed by how painless that was. LLVM requires VS 2013 atm (at least for building), but Windows/MSVC support is still being finalized (native MSVCRT exception handling etc.). VS 2008 is really quite old by now, so I'd really recommend upgrading (VS 2015 Community is free btw).
