Pathing in the D ecosystem is generally broken (at least on windows)

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 9/25/2015 6:03 AM, Dicebot wrote:
> Hm, so is the correct approach on Windows to provide separate shell for each
> application that has console utilities? X_x

VS 10 does that, and I find it highly annoying. It sets a zillion environment 
variables that I have no idea what they are for or what they do. Evidently, this 
is the modern way, though I find it very unfriendly.

DMC++ is designed to work without any environment variables at all. (It uses 
sc.ini to find where things are.) It was the only compiler of its day that did 
not require any installation, it would run off of the CD.

The real problem is that DMD for Win64 requires some VS components. With every 
new release of VS, Microsoft throws every library and executable at a dart board 
and moves them to those random new directories.

But I also do not understand why professional developers have such a hard time 
understanding what PATH is and apparently have no idea where the libraries exist 
on their system or how to find out where they are.