Note from a donor

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 10/26/17 7:09 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 10:16:27 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
>> On 10/26/17 00:32, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> 
>>>
>>> IIRC, there have been people on these forums that have been asking why
>>> they need to download additional software when they already have the
>>> compiler.
>>>
>>> Same on macOS.
>>>
>>
>> How many though? Also, we have to do it for macOS, why is Windows 
>> special? The macOS setup was just as hard. Download two large packages 
>> (XCode+Cmd tools), install, and done.
> 
> There definitely has been an uptick in that sort of complaint. The 
> question should be, how many aren't coming here to complain?
> 
> My initial internal reaction has always been, "just download and install 
> -- how hard is it?". But one day I stopped and asked myself, what if I 
> were coming to D today? I got by just fine for years without having VS 
> installed. Once the 6.0 days were behind me, I neither needed nor wanted 
> VS. I was content with mingw for my C stuff. When I first came to D, I 
> came with the full knowledge that there was no ecosystem, things were 
> rough, and I'd have to do a lot by hand. I stuck around because the 
> language was worth it. If I came in today and saw that I needed to 
> install VS just to get 64-bit binaries, I doubt I'd stick around long 
> enough to discover how great the language is.
> 
> I also didn't like that I had to install the Xcode tools on my Mac, but 
> that's needed for any development on Mac from what I can see.

A wizard-style installation with links to things and a good flow might 
help a lot here. Is that possible? -- Andrei