D Lang installation on Windows, dependency on Visual Studio?

[kink via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 16 November 2016 at 17:34:58 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> 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.

+1000. I hope this ridiculous thread comes to an end (nope, ELLCC 
is not a solution).

So yes, the DMD installer is right in warning that 64-bit code 
cannot be linked if VS isn't detected. It should detect the VC++ 
Build Tools though => 
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16688. 32-bit MS COFF 
cannot be linked either, but let's not confuse new users by a too 
detailed msgbox.