Usability of D on windows?

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 23 August 2016 at 21:15:40 UTC, John Burton wrote:
> Except that half the time the compiler crashes with a stack 
> trace, and sometimes it just hangs. Occasionally if I move and 
> rearrange the code it will manage to compile it. There are also 
> worrying comments on the LDC web page about how "Most programs 
> work just fine" and "Several unit tests still fail" and stuff 
> about it relying on stuff from visual c++ in order to work that 
> make me seriously doubt it's stability and correctness.
>
> I'm like an honest opinion... Am I wasting my time trying to do 
> this project in D on Windows? I'll continue to use and support 
> the language but I don't want to fight a losing battle and end 
> up having to move away anyway...
>
> Is there a stable LDC, or is there possibly something wrong 
> with my install? Is LDC sufficiently working to use for 
> "production"?
>
> If there a GDC port to windows at all? It seems there is, but 
> if there is it's well hidden...

LDC is what you want. I predict you will run into some bugs 
occasionally, but some of the documentation / wiki stuff is 
probably old and overly pessimistic about the state of affairs. 
Please report any bugs you do hit to 
https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues (any compiler crash 
is a bug).

If you have no patience for any bugs and must have the best 
optimised code on windows, D isn't quite there yet. However, if 
you can stomach a little pain, the reward is pretty good.

P.S. relying on the microsoft linker is not much different (once 
it's installed) to relying on ld on linux.