D for Game Development

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

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.