Note from a donor

[Patrick Schluter]

On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 12:36:40 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 October 2017 at 11:32:26 UTC, Andrei 
> Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>> A wizard-style installation with links to things and a good 
>> flow might help a lot here. Is that possible? -- Andrei
>
> The DMD installer is already a Wizard on Windows.
>
> First it checks if you have a current version of D and will 
> uninstall that, then it checks if you want to install D2 along 
> with some extras (Visual D, DMC, D1), and it goes through 
> additional steps to install the extras if you select them.
>
> However, if you need Visual Studio installed, then that takes 
> like a half an hour. My recollection is that it's a little 
> tricky if you upgrade to a new version of VS. I usually just 
> uninstall D and reinstall it rather than deal with that.
>
There are other issues with the Visual Studio install that D is 
not responsible for but is annoying as hell. It's Microsofts 
fault but the result is that D installation is made difficult. To 
install VS, it downloads first the installer which will then 
download and install the software. That installer doesn't work  
with the proxy installation we have on our work PC. The only way 
is to find the offline install package. I know they exist but 
finding them on the mess that is Microsoft's website is nearly 
impossible.
The other difficulty, installing Visual Studio when the system 
partition is small is also nearly impossible.
As I said, not the fault of D but annoying in any case.
This said, building apps purely 32 bit on Windows has the 
advantage of allowing  compatibility with legacy systems still 
running on XP. There are still some of them still around.