What is up with building DMD (et al.) on Windows?

[Seb via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Tuesday, 10 May 2016 at 04:48:23 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> I went to build DMD on Windows for the first time tonight and I 
> have to say that it was a terrible experience when compared 
> with Linux.
>
> First issue I ran into was having HOST_DC not being set. I'm 
> not sure if the DMD installer is supposed to do this or if I 
> needed to take care of it, but it wasn't mentioned anywhere I 
> could find. I finally just set it myself.
>
> Then it builds DMD, but gets placed in dmd/src/ instead of its 
> own directory.
>
> After DMD is built, other things keep getting built by DMC. I 
> get more than a few errors due to having an eof character on 
> the first line of some .h files, or something like that.
>
> I also built druntime, but instead of trying to use a freshly 
> built dmd.exe in the neighboring DMD source directory, it went 
> for the one in PATH. I haven't bothered to build Phobos on 
> Windows yet.
>
> Building DMD, Phobos, and druntime on Linux is so easy and 
> straight forward. It all works as expected. What's up with 
> building DMD on Windows?

The problem is that not many people use Windows to develop dmd.
AFAIK the makefile is supposed to work as autotester runs the 
same.

There are a couple of devs using Windows, but it seems like they 
aren't around here. Maybe you can try to ping them in our irc?

Anyhow probably the best hope you got is that we move away from 
Makefiles to a cross-platform solution. It's work in progress, 
but hopefully reaches us soon:
https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4194