Weird compiler

[Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 19 June 2016 at 14:45:43 UTC, Rene Zwanenburg wrote:
> On Sunday, 19 June 2016 at 14:05:22 UTC, mogu wrote:
>> Today, I'm working on a private GUI tool which must be run at 
>> linux and windows. It's awful that I compile a little 64bit 
>> program(or -m32mscoff) in windows must have visual studio 
>> which has tremendous size installed even though I only need a 
>> linker. It's weird that a compiler compiles to binary targets 
>> needs another compiler or tools. Sigh.
>
> There's no need to install VS if you don't use it otherwise, 
> the windows platform SDK should suffice; it comes with the 
> microsoft linker and all the lib files, and the DMD installer 
> should detect it just fine.

Then there should be a better pointer to the installation process.

I had similar issues as the OP to build on Windows. Installing 
the Visual Studio cruft is not as easy as it looks like. While it 
is probably a good ide and compiler it is a chore to install on 
somewhat atypical windows PC. At home, my windows is installed on 
a SSD and only a 52 GB partition (around 10 GB free), which means 
that big apps have to be installed on other partition. The Visual 
Studio cruft does not allow to do that correctly, it installs 
quite a lot of stuff on the system drive (and I suppose that the 
system crash I got 1 week after installation was linked to that 
installation). On my work PC the issue was a bit different, the 
sys partition is bigger, but we are behind an annoying proxy and 
the corporate policies are restricted, making the installation of 
it a real adventure (finding the downloadable .iso on microsoft's 
page requires a degree for itself).
While I understand that relying on Microsft tools simplifies the 
dmd compiler, it is really a big installation hurdle (on Linux 
the issue is quite different and has more to do with the 
braindead policies of our IT service. We must compile everything 
from sources and building dmd is difficult, building a D compiler 
that requires a D compiler to be built has some spice (this said 
gcc 5.1 was also not easy to build with gcc 4.4.7 preinstalled, 
gcc 4.4.7 fails on gcc 5.1, you have to build 4.7, with 4.7 4.8 
and 4.8 is the last version that can compile the C++ used in 
newer versions).