D Lang installation on Windows, dependency on Visual Studio?

[Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 16 November 2016 at 09:21:18 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 November 2016 at 14:41:34 UTC, Daniel Kozak 
> wrote:
>> AFAIK ld on mingw can`t link against mscoff file format so it 
>> is not very usable.
>
> It's dmd/optlink that don't support mscoff, mingw supports only 
> mscoff.
>
>> LLD is quite new so I do not know how production ready is.
>
> AFAIK that's only because of lack of support for debug info. 
> The rest works.
>
>> Btw. today I want to start working on a D project in work, but 
>> I cant, because there is not enoght space on C:\ partion and 
>> there is not possible to instal VS to another disk :( (Ok in 
>> few attempt of installing VS there has been path I can change 
>> but it does not work anyway, still VS is trying to install to 
>> C:\ ).
>
> My system drive is filled with 80gb and it has 3 versions of 
> VS, 2 ssms, sdk and whatnot installed on it. If your system 
> drive doesn't stretch, you should consider what you fill it 
> with as you would do in old good days.

Another issue I had with the Microsoft Package besides the size 
it wants on the system drive is the difficulty to even get it to 
download behind a corporate proxy. It took me hours to find a 
disk image version of the (free) visual stuff on the rotten 
Microsoft sites.
I get the technical reasons for using the MS toolchain but that 
doesn't change the fact that it is an ugly wart that has several 
negative aspect. Because in addition to the cases already 
described where it can be a pita to install there's also an image 
problem with that approach. dmd's adoption had always suffered 
from the closed source licence of the backend with one small 
company, adding a second depency, furthermore on a company not 
specially known for its openess (yeah, I know that it's a little 
bit better now) will raise criticism.
This issue is not big but it is definitely a - point when one 
makes a checklist of + and - points for a language (just a 
semi-related question, what's the state of play in the concurrent 
languages go, rust, scala etc...?)