Updating Windows SDK static libraries of the DMD distribution

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, February 14, 2017 17:15:59 kinke via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 14 February 2017 at 14:11:31 UTC, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
> > It's a quite frequent issue to get unresolved externals on
> > Windows, because the lib files of the Windows platform SDK are
> > still stuck at Windows XP age. It would make a lot of sense to
> > update those to the latest Windows 10 SDK, but I couldn't find
> > a place where those are present physically, except for the
> > release archives.
> >
> > Does anyone know where those are stored or has the means to
> > update them? Martin?
>
> My 2 cents: (serious) Windows devs should install their own
> Visual C++ (linker + C runtime) & WinSDK and use DMD with
> `-m32mscoff` or `-m64` (to use MS linker instead of OptLink). The
> Win10 SDK doesn't support XP afaik and so may not be suited for
> all users; there's no 'one fits them all'.

I would point out that we technically don't support Windows XP. If you use D
with it, and it works for you, great, but you're on your own.

That being said, I don't know enough about the Windows SDK to have any clue
what we should do with it. If it actually requires Windows 10 to use the
Win10 SDK, then I don't see how we could include it by default, since we do
support Windows 7 (and most folks I know who use Windows refuse to upgrade
beyond 7 until they have to, though there are obviously plenty of folks out
there on 8 or 10).

- Jonathan M Davis