D Lang installation on Windows, dependency on Visual Studio?

[Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 16 November 2016 at 17:06:37 UTC, Patrick Schluter 
wrote:
> 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...?)

Ok, I checked for Rust. They have 2 ABI versions one with MSVC 
and the other for gcc in 32 and 64 bits. MSVC ABI requires the 
same build tools from Microsoft, so the situation is the same 
there.
go doesn't need the MS tools apparently.