D Lang installation on Windows, dependency on Visual Studio?

[rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d]

On 14/11/2016 9:38 PM, AB wrote:
> Installing D 2.072.0 on Windows 7 64-bit. After installation is complete
> I get the following two error (warning?) messages, screenshots here:
>
> http://imgur.com/a/5fydB
>
> For your convenience they read as follows:
>
> "Could not detect Visual Studio (2008-2015 are supported). No 64-bit
> support."
>
> "Could not detect Windows SDK (6.0A-10.0 are supported). No 64-bit
> support."
>
> So the above means that the DMD compiler will not be able to generate
> 64-bit executables on my system, because a third-party piece of software
> is missing? This is ridiculous, what does Visual Studio have to do with
> DMD and its capability to generate 64-bit code?
>
> "You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana
> and the entire jungle."

Visual Studio automatically installs the MSVC tool chain which includes 
the linker, Microsoft's libc and of course import libraries for linking 
against.
Which we use for 64bit and 32bit coff support.

This is the systems official tool chain, it isn't all that rediculas. 
After all, it is what is "standard" for building c/c++ libraries on 
Windows, which is nice for you know compatibility reasons.