D Lang installation on Windows, dependency on Visual Studio?

[Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 16 November 2016 at 17:06:37 UTC, Patrick Schluter 
wrote:

> 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...?)

Why is it a wart? The MS toolchain is the system development 
environment for Windows. On Mac OS X, it's Xcode, which is a 1+ 
GB download before you can do any development with clang or dmd 
or anything that depends on it. On Linux distros, if it the GCC 
packages aren't already installed, they need to be pulled down.

I mean, I get that the MS tools might not be perceived by some as 
the 'system' tools, but that is what they are. It's no different 
than the other systems DMD is distributed on.